Sibelius (software)

Sibelius is a scorewriter program, created by Sibelius Software (now part of Avid Technology) for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and historically RISC OS. It is used by composers, arrangers, performers, music publishers, teachers and students, particularly for writing classical, jazz, band, vocal, film and television music. Beyond editing and printing scores, Sibelius can also play music back using synthesized sounds, produce legible scores for editing and printing, and publish scores for others to access via the Internet and iPads.

Sibelius says that it is the world's best-selling scorewriter, with "hundreds of thousands of users in 100 countries".

'Lite' versions of Sibelius, with fewer features, at lower prices, have been released, as have various add-ons for the software.

History

Sibelius was originally developed by British twins Ben and Jonathan Finn for the Acorn Archimedes computer, under the name Sibelius 7. Development (done on RISC OS fully in assembly language) was started in 1986, just after the Finns left school, continuing while they were at university. They were music students, and they said they wrote the program because they did not like the laborious process of writing music by hand.

Sibelius Software

Sibelius Software is a software business and a part of Avid Technology that develops and sells music notation software.

The company was named after the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, and was founded in April 1993 by twins Ben and Jonathan Finn to sell the Sibelius notation program. It went on to develop and distribute various other music software products, particularly for education. In addition to its head office in Cambridge and subsequently London, Sibelius Software opened offices in the US, Australia and Japan, with distributors and dealers in many other countries worldwide.

In August 2006 the company was acquired by Avid, to become part of its Digidesign division, which also manufactures the leading digital audio workstation Pro Tools.

In July 2012, Avid announced plans to divest its consumer businesses, closed the Sibelius London office, and laid off the original development team, despite extensive protests on Facebook and elsewhere. Avid subsequently recruited some new programmers to continue development of Sibelius.