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.