Possibly the greatest revolution to hit music engraving in 20 years, Magnetic Layout automatically optimizes element placement as you create and edit your score. All score objects—staves, notes, slurs, accidentals, tuplets, dynamics, lyrics, chord symbols, tempo marks, rehearsal marks and more—intelligently attract or repel to make sure your music is as clear as possible. Drag something across a complex score, and other objects helpfully jump out of the way. All this ingenuity under the hood means you don’t have to think about layout—just input the music and let Sibelius 6 software take care of the rest. It’s really that easy.

With Sibelius 6 software, you can create chord symbols and guitar chord diagrams faster than ever from your computer keyboard, MIDI keyboard or MIDI guitar. Just type a chord name on your computer keyboard (no special characters required), or play it on your MIDI instrument. Chords will automatically appear as a chord symbol, a guitar diagram in a choice of voicings, or both together. The built-in library of 600+ chord types is easier than ever to use and produces suitable guitar voicings for any chord.

Sibelius 6 also features many enhancements and extra notations. Advanced users have a huge choice of conventions for writing chord extensions, including different ones for root notes—English, German, Scandinavian or Solfege. Draw guitar diagrams and scales vertically or horizontally, and change any diagram’s size. You can even design your own chord diagrams, save them for future use and send your customized library to other people. Use hundreds of customizable guitar scale diagrams or create your own—including fret numbers and string letters.

If you prefer using a keyboard or guitar to notation, these beautiful new windows are ideal. Simply click on the keys or frets to input notes and chords—or ‘play’ your computer’s QWERTY keys just like a piano. But these windows aren’t just for inputting. Select any note/chord, and the keyboard or fretboard shows how it’s played. When you play the score back, you can follow the music on the keyboard or fretboard, too—even if it’s written for other instruments. If you’re a guitarist, you can choose from acoustic, maple or rosewood neck in three sizes, and 6-string guitar or 4/5-string bass.

Live Tempo lets you ‘conduct’ the playback of your score to produce a nuanced, musical performance. Simply tap a key on your computer keyboard, MIDI controller or foot pedal, and Sibelius follows your beat. Every detail of your interpretation is recorded, so you can play it back again later, or produce an audio or MIDI file of your performance. And just like a real conductor, change your beating patterns at any point, and Sibelius 6 will follow you: Subdivide beats for a rit, tap one in a bar in a fast passage, or stop beating entirely and Sibelius 6 will keep going. At fermatas (pauses), Sibelius 6 holds until your next beat, just like an orchestra. You can even record separate tempos for different repeats of a section. Should you want to edit your performance, you can delete or re-record sections of Live Tempo, or play back with Live Tempo switched off entirely.

Thanks to the latest technology from Digidesign’s Advanced Instrument Research (A.I.R.) group, Sibelius 6 now seamlessly integrates instant high-quality playback. You can now adjust everything directly on the Mixer, including new high-quality effects on each staff such as convolution reverb and chorus, plus up to six faders for other effects like EQ, distortion and timbre. All fader positions and settings are now saved in the score for instant recall.

Sibelius 6 software comes with a serious complement of sounds, including over 40 new instruments. The new Sibelius Sounds Essentials library includes a variety of improved orchestral, choral and jazz sounds from Garritan, Tapspace and the A.I.R. group. You also get a General MIDI virtual instrument library from M-Audio, providing a full range of sounds particularly suited to playing MIDI files—even on older computers. Sibelius 6 software provides up to 128 channels, so you can use as many different sounds at once as your computer can handle.

The ReWire standard lets you record audio from Sibelius 6 on a digital audio workstation (DAW), such as Pro Tools® M-Powered™. It also synchronizes Sibelius with your DAW so they can play back at the same time. This opens up all kinds of possibilities for using Sibelius 6 with other audio software. For example, you could add an acoustic solo instrument line to your Sibelius playback by recording your score into your DAW, or by making Sibelius and your DAW play back simultaneously. ReWire is so widely used that you can connect Sibelius 6 to almost any audio program including Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer, Cakewalk, Reaper and even Garageband. No other notation program can do this.

Another ingenious first in music software, Versions, keeps track of revisions to your score, lets you look back at earlier versions of it, and see what changes were made since. Students can record their progress as they write coursework, and submit an automatic commentary along with their piece. Teachers can track what each student has done since the previous week. Composers and arrangers can look back at earlier revisions, or see changes made by orchestrators, publishers and other collaborators. Compare two versions of a score—or two different scores—to see the differences. You can even post color-coded comment notes as reminders to yourself or to communicate with others.

People have been asking for years about inputting music from a microphone – and AudioScore lets you do just that. Developed by Neuratron, creators of PhotoScore, AudioScore lets you input music into Sibelius simply by singing or playing an instrument. Just hit a button to place the results right into Sibelius software.

Sibelius 6 software offers the most advanced notation options—period. Control the shape, thickness, height and shoulders of slurs. Set preferences for automatic handling of cautionary accidentals. Add bar repeats right from the Keypad, complete with intrinsic automatic numbering. Quickly add jazz articulations like scoops, falls, doits and plops from the Keypad. Accommodate modern notations through the use of stemlets (half-stems), beamed rests, feathered beams, extreme tuplets and more. There’s no notation task too extreme for Sibelius 6.

The brand new SibeliusMusic.com makes it even easier for you to earn an income from electronic sales of your scores around the world. Or you can just share and exchange scores with fellow musicians and Sibelius users.

Sibelius is perfect for expanding the notation capabilities of Pro Tools M-Powered. You can also choose from M-Audio’s wide range of keyboards including DCP digital console pianos, ProKeys Sono MIDI controllers with built piano sounds, and Oxygen®, Axiom® and Axiom Pro advanced MIDI keyboard controllers. Listen to playback of your scores through M-Audio recording interfaces and studio monitors. M-Audio microphones such as the Nova and Luna are great choices when using the Neuratron AudioScore Lite included in Sibelius 6.