About

First, an important disclaimer: this blog is in no way affiliated with Sibelius Software, Digidesign or any other part of Avid Technology, Inc. The views expressed herein are those of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the policies, positions, strategies or opinions of Avid Technology, Inc. or any other party with which I am directly or indirectly associated.

With that out of the way: this blog is intended to provide insights into the world’s favourite music notation software, from the unique perspective of its Senior Product Manager. You’ll find hints and tips about how to make the most of the product, and interesting stories about how Sibelius is being used in a variety of contexts for all sorts of exciting projects.

This blog is not intended to act as an avenue for technical support for Sibelius, however. If you have any problems using the software, there are much better places to get help than here.

About me

My name is Daniel Spreadbury, and I’m Sibelius’s Senior Product Manager. I’ve been working at Sibelius since 1999 and have been involved in lots of different aspects of the company’s operations in that time. I began in the technical support team, and quickly took on the authoring of the documentation that ships with Sibelius. Before too long, my friend and colleague Andrew Davis and I were put to work on SibeliusMusic.com, the community-based self-publishing site for Sibelius users, taking advantage of the unique Scorch web browser plug-in, which opened for business in 2001.

I became increasingly involved in the development of the core Sibelius application following the release of Sibelius 2 in 2001, and was fortunate to work closely with Ben and Jonathan Finn, the inventors of Sibelius and founders of the company, as we worked towards the release of Sibelius 3. Since then, I have been product manager for Sibelius, Scorch and the various cut-down versions of Sibelius.

Being product manager is an incredibly rewarding job. I am the interface between our customers, the customer-facing parts of our business, and our incredible team of developers. I go out and meet with people, and talk to hundreds (if not thousands) of people every year about Sibelius and how we could make it even better. I am the custodian of our famous long, long list of possible feature ideas (and you might find the occasional bug there, too), and I work with all of the other fantastic people at Sibelius to figure out what features and fixes we should work on in our next version (read the official policy on how this is done). Once we know what we’re going to do, I work closely with my fellow product managers and our developers to design exactly how the features are going to work, and then the developers do all the hard work of turning our specifications into reality.

Before I came to work at Sibelius, I obtained my degree in music from Oxford University, and was one of the two tenor lay clerks in the choir of Ely Cathedral for two years. I’m a keen singer and choral conductor, currently working with The Cantilena Singers in Cambridgeshire. I’ve even been known to write the odd little choral piece or arrangement in Sibelius myself, but my hectic work schedule doesn’t leave much time for it!

I’m very glad to be able to interact with the community of Sibelius users on this blog, and I’m looking forward to engaging in conversation with all of you!