Product Description

Sibelius 5 music notation software helps teachers with preparing teaching materials and arrangements. It lets students hear how their work sounds, makes it easy to find and correct mistakes, and is much more fun to use than pen and paper! Sibelius 5 is suitable for all educational levels-it?s easy for beginners, yet sophisticated enough for all university requirements. At university level, Sibelius 5 software satisfies the most advanced requirements, from avant-garde and early music notation to Schenkerian analysis. If you?re an instrumental teacher, Sibelius makes it quick to create exercises, scan in, transpose pieces, and produce accompaniments and arrangements-you?ll never need to write out parts again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1216 in Software
• Brand: Sibelius
• Model: 9910-42553-00
• Released on: 2007-06-25
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• Score-writing software that saves time and encourages learning
• Helps teachers prepare teaching materials and arrangements
• 1700+ ready-made worksheets, exercises, projects, songs, and more
• Ideas Hub with over 2000 ready-made ideas for students to use
• Realistic playback; suitable for all educational levels

From the Manufacturer
Save hours of time and encourage students to learn with the foremost score-writing software, Sibelius 5 Educational Edition. Sibelius is suitable for all educational levels--it’s easy for beginners, yet sophisticated enough for all university requirements. Special discounted educational pricing and site licenses are available.

Sibelius helps teachers with preparing teaching materials and arrangements. It lets students hear how their work sounds, makes it easy to find and correct mistakes, and is much more fun to use than pen and paper!

At university level, Sibelius satisfies the most advanced requirements, from avant garde and early music notation to Schenkerian analysis.

If you’re an instrumental teacher, Sibelius makes it quick to create exercises, scan in and transpose pieces, and produce accompaniments and arrangements--you’ll never need to write out parts again!

Ideas Hub

Over 2000 ready-made ideas are included for students to use, in a huge range of styles from classical, jazz, and band to world music, rock, and hip-hop. By using these ideas in their music, students of all abilities can discover how melodies, harmonies, and rhythms can be put together to create differing textures and musical structures.

They could start with just one or two ideas for inspiration, or alternatively use ideas as building blocks to create a complete piece. You can keep track of what they’ve done, because Sibelius marks where ideas are used in the score.

If you prefer, you can switch off all of the ready-made ideas, or just give students a few specific ones, for more focused exercises.

Worksheets

Sibelius's Worksheet Creator lets you produce over 1700 different ready-made worksheets, exercises, projects, songs, instrumental pieces, posters, and other resources, suitable for students at all levels.

Internet studying

With Sibelius, you can put coursework onto your school/university Web site or our special site SibeliusEducation.com for students to view, play, print, and save to disk. SibeliusEducation.com also provides additional teaching materials and resources from other educators and from Sibelius Software.

Sibelius comes with free-time limited access to GroveMusic.com, the Internet version of the world's leading music encyclopedia.

Video

Sibelius lets you compose to any video file--ideal for student multimedia projects. You can view the video side-by-side with the score, and they're always kept in sync so you can see what's happening in the video at any point in the music and vice versa. More advanced features such as timecode and hit points make it easy to make your music fit with important events in the action.

Sibelius comes with a variety of short videos to compose to--from Charlie Chaplin to Mr. Bean. You can get further ones from SibeliusEducation.com, or download trailers and adverts to write to from many other Web sites.

Arranging and transposing

The Arrange feature saves hours of time in creating arrangements and keyboard reductions. It’s also ideal for students who are learning arranging, composition, or even orchestration.

Transposing is another great time-saver for putting pieces into suitable keys, and adjusting exercises for different instruments or abilities.

Playback

When playing, Sibelius selects the right instrumental sounds, reads markings straight from the score, and adds expression, so students get a realistic rendition of their music right away. And they can check for mistakes, just by listening. You can also use Sibelius to play aural tests, accompaniments, and even create CDs and MP3 files of your music.

Color and graphics

Notes which are too high/low are shown in red; you can adjust instrument ranges to write for players of different abilities. Music can be hidden, so students can fill in an exercise on computer and then reveal the right answer.

Sibelius lets you add color, pictures, and graphic notations to coursework; lots of graphics are included. You can also take music from Sibelius into word processors and graphics packages, for creating worksheets, posters, etc. in other programs.

Plug-ins

Sibelius includes many educational plug-ins, to automate tasks such as writing note names and beats above notes, creating sets of scales and arpeggios, adding brass/string fingering and tonic sol-fa, and identifying motives for musical analysis.

School features

Students find Sibelius so much fun to use in the classroom that they sometimes play around with it instead of getting on with their work! So you can switch off all of the advanced features with a couple of clicks, leaving only the main things students need for coursework.

You can also turn individual features on/off, and create your own sets of features for different classes--e.g. if you're teaching how to transpose by hand, you can stop students transposing it automatically!

What's New:

• Ideas Hub: capture, use, and re-use snippets
• Panorama: a new, clearer way of viewing music
• Stunning new sounds and playback: 150+ high-quality built-in sounds
• VST and Audio Units: mix and match from different libraries
• Easy cues and instrument changes: instrumental parts made even easier
• Complete layout control: flexible page layout and numbering
• Power tools and undoable plug-ins: new fonts and plug-ins
• More new features: over 40 other improvements

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Incredible
Sibelius 5 is essential music notation software for anyone who needs this sort of software--professionals, educators, students and amateurs. Sibelius is, quite simply, as powerful as it is easy to use. While, I think, many more people are familiar with Finale, and while the end product of your score would probably be the same if you used Finale, with Sibelius, it's much more fun because it's so extremely easy.

Here are a couple of specific things I like about it: Cross-staff beaming is a breeze. If you make a change in a conductor's score, the change is instantly updated in the individual part. Formatting is instant if you move things around.

Also, if you're a film score student, Sibelius 5 has several videos, complete with scores, built in, and video instructions teach you how to do it.

If you're an educator, Sibelius 5 comes with hundreds of worksheets that I find to be extremely useful.

In fact, the best way to see how easy Sibelius is to use is to go to their website, www.sibelius.com, and download a demo version. Please note, this demo is the full notation software. Unlike other demos that hold back many of its key features, this demo will let you do anything and everything--with the obvious exception of printing and saving. Try it out for yourself and see just how easy it is.

I continue to be amazed at how powerful and easy this software is. Try the demo, then come back here and buy it.

Top notch software for any musician
This is a wonderful notation software for any musician. As a Middle School Orchestra director, I use it to compose, arrange and transpose appropriate materials for my students. In addition, I can create and customize worksheets that focus on specific skills, concepts or techniques that I'm addressing in their performance materials and method books.

There are quite a few ways you can input your notation making it a fairly swift process. You can input using the piano scroll, midi, microphone, mouse, computer keyboard or you can even purchase an add on software that allows you scan music in.

One thing you need to keep in mind when you are purchasing this software is that you will need a DVD rom to install this software. It is Vista compatable, but Vista has some issues that can make it difficult to install. My laptop has Vista and I had all sorts of problems with installation and ended up getting help. This software is well worth the hassle you may encounter when installing under the vista operating system.

Sooo much better than Finale
Sibelius 5 is incredibly good. I've been using Finale (2000) for quite a few years now, and there was a moment in using it a few weeks ago when I asked it to do an arpeggio in 4/4 time with 3 groups of triplet sixteenths in the space of three triplet eighths and it f***ing EXPLODED. I threw up my hands, and downloaded the trial version of Sibelius 5. Granted, it took a little getting used to, and I'll probably still be discovering some of its secrets for years to come, but from off the bat, it's good and fun to use.

I can copy a figure and repeat it (But it doesn't want to let me copy parts of measures that involve triplets, you have to copy the whole measure.) without trouble. After you figure out how to use the voicing tool (or layering as it's called in Finale), it's quite good. I have some trouble writing acciaturas at the ends of measures when the music changes clef, but for that one instance it wasn't a big deal.

The above issue that caused Finale to explode was a cinch on Sibelius 5. This is worth every penny, and I look forward to exploring more of its capabilities in the future..