Rests now intelligently avoid notes when writing in multiple voices, and group with each other in a beam-group and/or bar. This feature includes new options in Engraving Rules to allow you to choose how rests are moved and grouped together. These options are on in all new scores and off when opening older scores. To find these new settings, have a look in the new Rests section of Engraving Rules.
MP3 Export
Sibelius 8.1 adds the ability to export directly to MP3, removing the need to convert exported audio in another application. As you may know, there are licensing costs when converting to MP3, which we are covering for you.
Nth time ending lines
First, second and third time ending lines are now placed correctly by default.
Fixes to pinch/stretch and scroll using the trackpad on Mac
We've made further improvements to the way two-finger scrolling and pinch zoom are handled on Mac trackpads. In particular, users of Sibelius 8.0.1 will be aware that scrolling on a Mac was troublesome. This is now vastly improved in Sibelius 8.1.
Official El Capitan support
Sibelius is now officially supported on Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 and higher.
Google Breakpad
In the event of a crash, Sibelius now offers to upload a report to our servers which is then collated amongst other reports to help guide our efforts in improving Sibelius' stability. All information sent is anonymous.
Further miscellaneous fixes and improvements
Sibelius no longer displays an error when using Share > Send using email
Many dialogs now aren't stretched on El Capitan
"This package is incompatible with this version of OS X" no longer appears when attempting to install the licence server on El Capitan
Reduce plug-in now doesn’t degrade to being much slower on subsequent uses
A problem where Sibelius would leak file handles is fixed
Spaces were missing from the German tutorials
Keypad button highlight logic now behaves properly after using the Transformation plug-ins
We've added a new "add11" chord to the Chords library
All characters in the news feed now display correctly
Sibelius 8.1 also includes several fixes to the most common crashes, which include:
generating thumbnail score previews in the Quick Start
'RTTI access violation error' after closing a score, when the Quick Start is disabled
crash when quitting Sibelius on El Capitan (mainly fixed by Apple in 10.11.2 and later)
using the Explode plug-in in conjunction with Undo operations
when adjusting the color parameters of graphics
To get the upgrade, simply open AVID Application Manager and you should get a prompt to download the upgrade. Your downloads will have already been updated in your AVID account too, which you can find at
