Sibelius: The Next Generation

Philip Rothman at Scoring Notes:

Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.4, announcing it at their Avid Connect event in Las Vegas, Nevada. This update, the second of the year and using the new year-dot-month version number introduced with 2018.1, is another broad release with many new features and some longstanding requests addressed. Areas of improvement include multi-edits for text, a new note spacing rule affecting multiple voices and other cases, deleting and adding bars at the beginning of the score, smarter ties, and many more other enhancements.

Avid also announced a new naming strategy in their product lines so that each line has the same three tiers: a very basic free entry-level version denoted by the “First” suffix; a consumer or student level with no suffix; and a pro-level version called “Ultimate”.

This new update sounds great, but the new name, “Sibelius Ultimate” is really, really dumb. The introductory product assuming the name of the former professional product is also going to be really, really confusing. I’m no marketing pro, but this seems like a change that will cause a lot of problems for no apparent benefit.

Even ignoring the fact that the name “Sibelius” has identified a different product for thirty years, “Ultimate” looks very dated to me.