382: Sibelius 3.1 - list of bugs fixed in this update

The following is a list of the main bugs and problems reported by users that have been fixed in Sibelius 3.1. This list is not completely comprehensive; there are some smaller issues not listed here.

Please note that Sibelius 3.1 is no longer the most up-to-date version of Sibelius 3. You should instead install the free update to Sibelius 3.1.3 - click here to download it.

Arrange

• Arrange now behaves in exactly the same way as Sibelius 2 regarding splitting of voices.
• When the source passage ends with a tuplet, Sibelius no longer rewrites part of the bar following the end of the Arranged passage.
• Notes ended just before the start of a tuplet are no longer omitted when using Arrange to produce a keyboard reduction.
• A number of Arrange styles had descriptions longer than 255 characters, causing them to appear truncated on the Mac. These have now been shortened so that they appear correctly.

ASCII tab files

• Sibelius is now able to open ASCII tab files from folders with periods (full stops) in their names (Windows only)
• Sibelius now correctly saves an ASCII tab file of music that includes notes outside the instrument's playable range (represented as red question marks in the tab staff).
• If Sibelius needs to create a new staff type to accommodate a non-standard tuning in an imported ASCII tab file, it now works correctly.

Barlines

• Adding a special barline to a selected barline that is not in view no longer causes Sibelius to crash.

Beams

• It is now possible to use any non-numerical character (e.g. spaces, commas, periods, hyphens, etc.) to separate the beam groups specified by the user in the Beam and Rest Groups or Notes > Reset Beam Groups dialogs.
• Sibelius now always remembers the beam groups chosen for each different time signature within the same session (it is no longer necessary to click the Beam and Rest Groups button in the Time Signature dialog to confirm the previously-chosen beam groups).
• Rests are now appropriately grouped as two groups of three quarter notes in 6/4.

Chord diagrams

• Switching on Chords in library in the Create > Chord Diagram dialog now always shows all the chords in the chosen library.
• If the Chords used in this score option is switched on in Create > Chord Diagram, using Edit > Change Chord Diagram now toggles through all of the appropriate chord diagrams, rather than only two as before.

Default positions

• Problems with the Lyric-style input checkboxes in the House Style > Default Positions dialog have been resolved (Mac only).

Edit Sound Sets

• Sibelius no longer erroneously adds 1 to program numbers entered on the Sounds tab of the Play > Edit Sound Sets dialog, leading to incorrect sounds when using the sound set.

Edit Staff Types

• The Stem Lengths radio buttons (on the Notes and Rests page of the Edit Staff Type dialog) are now correctly initialized on Mac OS 9.
• Replaced the Choose button on the Percussion page of the Edit Staff Type dialog with a drop-down menu listing all the noteheads.
• The list control in House Style > Edit Staff Types is now wider, to accommodate the longest staff type names.

Extracting parts

• When Sibelius names parts during part extraction using the Score plus staff number option, it now truncates the file name to the correct length to make room for the staff number (Mac OS 9 only).
• When extracting parts into a folder that does not exist, clicking No when asked if you want to create the specified folder now results in the parts being created and displayed to the user, as it should.

Files

• Page margins of manuscript papers are no longer reset when creating new scores from the File > New dialog.

Flexi-time

• Flexi-time quantization has been significantly improved.
• It is now possible (as it was in Sibelius 2) for Flexi-time to notate tuplets against non-tuplets.
• When recording with Flexi-time in scores that begin with a pick-up (upbeat) bar, Sibelius now provides a click count-in of the number of bars specified in Notes > Flexi-time Options (by default, one full bar) plus a further whole bar in which recording begins on the appropriate beat to match the pick-up bar.
• Inputting into percussion staves using the pitches defined in the staff type (an option in the Notes > Note Input Options dialog) no longer suffers from significant latency.
• If you record into a staff which is set to play back through a high-latency device (such as Kontakt Player or another software synthesizer), a message will appear warning you that notes may end up notated incorrectly in your score, and recommending that you should choose a different playback device for this staff.

Guitar notation

• Adding a tab staff type change to an existing notation staff now results in the tab being fingered correctly on appropriate strings, rather than notated below the bottom string.
• Transposing part of a bar of guitar tab now only transposes the selected passage, and no longer erroneously transposes the unselected notes in the bar too.

Installing Sibelius

• On multi-user Windows 2000/XP systems, it is now possible for non-administrator users to use Kontakt Player after it was installed by the Administrator user.

Instruments

• Various cosmetic and accessibility improvements to the Layout > Instruments and Staves dialog.
• Adding further instruments to a score with existing instruments now places the instrument at its correct position relative to the existing instruments' position in the All instruments ensemble.

Key signatures

• Using the arrow keys to navigate the Create > Key Signature dialog now always results in the correct key signature being created.

Layout and formatting

• When copying and pasting passages in a score, the staff margins (in Layout > Document Setup) are no longer recalculated unnecessarily. The staff margins will change only if the music being pasted comes from another score in which the Instrument names text style uses a different font or point size.

Live Playback

• When View > Live Playback Velocities is switched on, you can change the vertical position of the Live Playback velocity columns relative to the staff by holding down Ctrl or Command and dragging one of the columns with the mouse. The columns can be dragged up to 20 spaces above or below the staff.
• The default Live Playback durations for notes in tuplets is now calculated correctly.
• View > Live Playback Velocities no longer displays velocity bars over hidden notes when View > Hidden Objects is switched off.

Look and feel

• The Sibelius toolbar no longer stops responding or disappears (e.g. when performing processor intensive operations such as opening MIDI files, printing, or switching between applications while Sibelius is 'busy') (Windows only).

Lyrics

• Lyric hyphens no longer appear and disappear as you zoom the score in and out.

ManuScript

• Sibelius 3.1 includes an updated version of ManuScript Language.pdf (in the Extras folder), including PDF bookmarks, corrections of a few minor errors, and documentation of a few new functions.
• New Stave.ShowInFocusOnStaves and Score.FocusOnStaves read/write variables.
• Added new Sibelius.ViewNoteColors variable to set the View > Note Colors options from ManuScript.
• Sibelius.ViewHighlights and Sibelius.ViewNoteVelocities now always work correctly regardless of their previous state (i.e. setting True always turns them on, and setting False always turns them off).
• Iterating over staves now correctly returns objects at the end of the bar (after any music in the bar), such as time signatures, clefs, etc.
• Repeatedly calling the AppendLineToFile function in ManuScript no longer causes Sibelius eventually to crash (Windows only).
• Sibelius no longer crashes when adding time signatures from ManuScript.

Menus and shortcuts

• Keyboard shortcut problems when using certain language-variants of Mac OS X (e.g. Icelandic, Greek, etc.) have now been resolved.
• Closing scores with the Command-W shortcut no longer causes Sibelius to crash (Mac OS X only).

MIDI devices

• Sibelius can now correctly use the OMS IAC bus (Mac OS 9 only).

Mixer

• When adding further instruments after initially creating a score, Sibelius now correctly assigns sequential MIDI channels to new staves in the Mixer, starting with the next unused channel. When all 16 channels are in use, Sibelius loops around and starts assigning instruments from channel 1 again.

Note input

• Under certain circumstances, Sibelius would not always choose the note in the nearest octave to the preceding note in alphabetic input; this no longer occurs.
• Hitting Tab with nothing selected now correctly selects the first bar rest in the first bar of the page.
• Switching on the Live velocity option on the Playback panel of Properties while the note input caret is visible no longer causes Sibelius to crash.
• The note input caret now always reflects the same color as the voice chosen on the Keypad (previously it was possible for it to display the wrong color after using Edit > Undo).

Note spacing

• When increasing the spacing of a passage including grace notes, the position of grace notes relative to the main note remains unchanged.
• The default space after a grace note and before a 'normal' note is now set to 0.5 spaces in newly-created scores. To change the default in existing scores, change the Extra space after last grace note parameter in House Style > Note Spacing Rule.
• Grace notes are no longer spaced too far away from the main note they precede if that main note is raised or lowered by an accidental earlier in the bar.
• When converting short rests to longer values, Sibelius now always contracts the unnecessary space correctly.
• When loading files created in earlier versions of Sibelius, automatic spacing contraction no longer causes the spacing to get corrupted when editing notes.
• Deleting shorter note values in one staff where other staves have longer note values no longer causes the spacing to contract unacceptably.
• In unisons in two voices where both notes have accidentals, Sibelius no longer leaves too much space (as if both notes had visible accidentals).
• Changes to values in the House Style > Note Spacing Rule dialog are now undoable.

Opening MIDI files

• Problems with Sibelius assigning apparently random guitar tab staff types to guitar tracks in imported MIDI files have been resolved.
• The progress bar that appears while importing MIDI files now fills more evenly over the course of the import.
• If Sibelius is the default application for opening MIDI files, the program now launches correctly and displays the Open MIDI File dialog when the user double-clicks on a MIDI file to launch Sibelius (Windows only).
• Further fixes to opening malformed MIDI files with incorrect track lengths; these files should now open without errors.
• Importing the time track of certain MIDI files could cause Sibelius 3 to appear to hang or eventually crash; this problem has now been resolved.
• Sibelius could crash when importing very large MIDI files; this problem is now fixed.

Optimization

• Problems on Windows 98/Me with Sibelius taking a very long time to start up, or even to freeze and never fully load, have been solved.
• In Sibelius 3.0, screen redraw and editing operations became increasingly slow towards the end of long scores. This problem has now been fixed; performance in long scores is now comparable with Sibelius 2.1.1.
• Editing operations on long passages are no longer substantially slower in Sibelius 3 than they were in Sibelius 2 (e.g. selecting a number of bars and using the up/down arrow keys to repitch them). The reduction in speed was due to the new Optical spacing algorithm in Sibelius 3, which recalculates the spacing of notes when their pitch changes, in order to ensure that things like leger lines and accidentals don't collide (in Sibelius 2, spacing was never recalculated when notes were repitched). The Optical spacing algorithm has been optimized, and this kind of operation is now between 5 and 10 times faster in Sibelius 3.1 than Sibelius 3.0.
• Sibelius no longer gradually slows down the longer it's been running.
• Problems with intermittent crashes caused by using the Enable copying with the mouse option in the File > Preferences > General dialog have been fixed.
• When minimized to the dock or otherwise put into the background, Sibelius now unloads the DLS Music Device, reducing the overall CPU usage when the program is not in the foreground (Mac OS X only).
• Plug-in Trace Window no longer overloads the CPU (Windows only).
• Sibelius 3 now correctly runs if no soundcard is installed on the computer.

Playback

• Two-note tremolos now play back with the correct number of notes (previously they often played back with one note too many, causing one note to hang over into the next bar).
• Playback of trilled tied notes no longer 'jolts' at barlines.
• Changes to percussion staff types are now immediately reflected in playback (e.g. changing the number of staff lines, or changing the sound used by a particular notehead at a particular position on the staff).
• The metronome click in pick-up (upbeat) bars now differentiates the beats of the bar correctly.
• Sibelius no longer 'plays' the silence specified by the Gap after final barlines option in Play > Performance unless the final barline is followed by further bars.
• Sibelius no longer erroneously shows the previous playback position when starting playback from somewhere else in the score.
• The playback line no longer leaves trails ('smears') across the screen or over the scroll bars during playback (Mac only).
• Consecutive notes of identical pitch in different voices are no longer truncated if Rubato is switched on and note durations are set to >100% in Play > Performance.
• Problems with repeated notes not sounding during playback due to interactions between Rubato, rit./accel. lines and time signature changes have been solved.
• To work around a bug in QuickTime on Mac OS 9 that intermittently caused a very loud attack on the first sound after initializing it for playback, the first time Sibelius plays a note (e.g. the test in Play > Devices, or the first note of playback), it adds a short delay to allow QuickTime to initialize fully (Mac OS 9).
• Starting and stopping playback repeatedly in quick succession no longer causes a crash (Mac OS 10.3 only).

Printing

• The Substitute Braces option in the File > Print dialog now works as before (Windows only).

Properties

• When restarting Sibelius, the open/closed state of the panels of the Properties window is now correctly maintained.

Registering Sibelius

• Extended characters (such as accented or non-European characters) now display correctly in the registration details on the Sibelius splash screen and in Help > About Sibelius (in the Sibelius menu on Mac OS X).
• If registering Sibelius on the Internet fails due to Sibelius not being able to contact the registration server, a specific message now appears to advise you of this.
• The Help > Register Sibelius dialog no longer rejects valid email addresses that contain periods after the first character (e.g. [email protected]).
• Title field label in the Help > Register Sibelius dialog now appears correctly (Mac OS 9 only).
• On Macs which had extended (high ASCII or Unicode) characters in the volume name for the hard disk, it was not possible to register Sibelius correctly. This problem has now been corrected.

Repeats

• Under certain circumstances, using 'jump to' and 'marker' text objects in your score could result in Sibelius crashing if timecode was set to display Above every bar; this no longer occurs.
• Sibelius no longer crashes if you start playback from the last bar of a score, and the last bar contains a 'jump to' instruction.

Saving audio tracks

• File > Save As Audio Track now works on Mac, provided Kontakt Player Silver (or Gold) is installed.
• If Sibelius is going to overwrite an existing .wav/.aiff file, it now warns the user and gives them the option to cancel.
• Sibelius no longer crashes on some computers at the conclusion of saving an audio track.

Saving graphics files

• TIFF files saved using the options for Macromedia Freehand and Macromedia Fireworks in the File > Save as Graphics dialog now use PackBits compression, which allows them to be opened in these applications.
• Saving a PICT file no longer causes Sibelius to crash (Mac OS X only).

Saving MIDI files

• Under certain circumstances, Sibelius could erroneously truncate the duration of notes with Live Playback data when saving MIDI files. This problem is now fixed.
• Exporting a MIDI file with Immediate program changes (in Play > Playback Options) switched on no longer causes tracks in which there are program changes to appear either much too early or much too late in the exported MIDI file.
• Notes at the ends of bars with longer Live Playback durations than their notated length no longer cause all subsequent notes on that staff to be output correspondingly late when saving MIDI files.

Scanning

• If PhotoScore is already running and the user chooses File > Scan or clicks the scanner button on Sibelius's toolbar, Sibelius now brings the running instance of PhotoScore to the foreground rather than running a new copy.
• Various minor improvements to PhotoScore file importing.

Selections and passages

• The message 'There is something in view that is not in view...' no longer appears erroneously when View > Hidden Objects is switched off. Fixing this has resulted in some changes in behavior concerning the selection of hidden objects when View > Hidden Objects is switched off:
  • Hidden objects are still not selectable by clicking at their position or by making a marquee selection over their position
  • Hidden objects are still selectable by navigating to them with the arrow or Tab keys
  • Hidden objects which have any fragment (e.g. beam, flag, accidental, articulation, etc.) selected can now themselves be selected, e.g. if you make a passage selection they will appear and can then be selected by clicking them
  • Once a hidden item has been selected, all of its fragments are drawn in gray and can be selected by clicking them.
  • This means that you can (say) select a bar containing only hidden notes, then select a notehead within that selection by clicking it.
• There is no longer a delay when deleting a selected object on Mac OS X.
• When copying passages including tuplets in any voice other than voice 1, the rhythm of those tuplets is no longer corrupted after copying.
• Under certain circumstances, pasting a selection into a new bar at the end of the score could cause rhythmic corruption; this problem is now resolved.

Staves

• Nameless staves now correctly appear with the name of the original instrument in square brackets in the Layout > Instruments and Staves, File > Extract Parts and Layout > Show Empty Staves dialogs.

Text

• Changing the text style of an object that contains characters in different fonts no longer changes all of the characters in the text object to the font of the first character.
• The clickable area for selecting and editing instrument names split over multiple lines is now correct.
• Text in the Figured bass text style no longer transposes when the score is transposed in newly-created scores. To prevent this behavior in existing scores, switch off the Transpose chord names option in the Edit Text Style dialog.
• The Technique text instruction 'Marimba' now correctly effects a program change to a marimba sound in newly-created scores. To correct this problem in existing scores, use the Play > Dictionary dialog.
• The word 'CODA' has been added to the Tempo text word menu.
• Fonts that use Icelandic Roman legacy encodings now display correctly in Sibelius (previously certain characters would be displayed as question marks) (Mac OS only).

Timecode

• Multiple timecodes (showing repeated passages) now stack vertically from a minimum distance above the staff upwards, so it no longer collides with the staff.
• If House Style > Timecode is set to display Above every bar, and an ambiguous repeat structure in the score means that some bars will never be played, Sibelius will no longer crash.

Time signatures

• In the Create > Time Signature dialog, the values in the Other drop-downs now update to reflect the chosen standard time signature, making it quicker to create e.g. a 3/8 time signature, by selecting the standard 6/8, then clicking Other and setting the numerator to 3 (no need to set the denominator).

View menu

• Zoom levels of Fit page and Fit 2 pages no longer display the score much smaller than the available window size.
• The Dialogs, brushed steel and Brushed steel textures have been removed.

Voices

• Changing voices of a passage selection using the buttons at the bottom of the Keypad now correctly lets you change the passage back to voice 1. This change has resulted in a subtle change in the behavior of the voice buttons:
• If you have a selected object in two or more voices and click the voice button of one of those voices, Sibelius sets that object to be in that voice only (before it would switch that voice off for the object). This has the benefit of making the behavior consistent with when you click one of the voice buttons when the All voices button is switched on.
• When a selected passage contains notes in different voices, the Keypad voice buttons are no longer illuminated.

Window menu

• When running Sibelius on multiple monitor systems, the floating windows (Properties, Mixer, Keypad, Navigator, Kontakt Player) now retain their position between sessions if placed on the secondary display.
• It is no longer possible to drag the floating windows completely off the screen, such that it's impossible to get them back.

---

Related articles

• A372 Sibelius 3 - list of bugs fixed