Sibelius Software

Sibelius Software Ltd.
Independent (1993–2006)
Subsidiary of Avid Technology (2006-present)
Industry Music, Technology
Founded April 1993 (1993-04)
Founder Ben Finn
Jonathan Finn
Headquarters 3 (Kiev, Warsaw and Montreal), London, England, United Kingdom
Area served
 Worldwide
Products Sibelius
Parent Avid Technology (2006–present)
Website www.sibelius.com

Sibelius Software Ltd. 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,[1][2][3] despite extensive protests on Facebook and elsewhere.[4][5] Avid subsequently recruited some new programmers to continue development of Sibelius.

The company has won numerous awards, including the Queen's Award for Innovation in 2005.

Products

The company's best-known product, Sibelius, enables the user to create, print and play back sheet music, and publish it via the Internet or iPad.

It was first released (under the name Sibelius 7) for Acorn computers in 1993. The business also sold Acorn computers, printers, MIDI equipment, word processing & graphics software, etc. because at that time many of its customers did not already have a computer; but the company stopped selling these products (and developing Acorn software) when it released Sibelius for Windows in September 1998. This was followed by a Mac version in March 1999. From the Windows release, the unusual suffix '7' was dropped from the Sibelius product name, and the version number restarted at 1.0.

Thereafter, the company has released new major Sibelius versions for Windows and Mac approximately every 2 years, with minor updates in between. It has also produced versions of Sibelius in many languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Russian.

The company has also released various other music programs, including special versions of Sibelius (e.g. for students and commercial electronic publishers), add-ons for Sibelius, and a range of software for teaching music called Sibelius Educational Suite. Some of this software was developed by other companies.

All of the company's current software (and most of its past software) is compatible with both Windows and Macintosh.

Current

Discontinued

Sibelius Educational Suite

Scorewriting software for Acorn computers

Timeline

(This excludes releases of software version upgrades.)

References

  1. ↑ "News from Classical Music Magazine". Rhinegold.co.uk. 4 July 2012. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
  2. ↑ "Avid Divests Consumer Businesses and Streamlines Operations". Business Wire. 2 July 2012. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
  3. ↑ "Of Note: Finale and Sibelius tips and tutorials by musician, arranger and music notation expert Robert Puff". Rpmseattle.com. 16 July 2012. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
  4. ↑ "Save Sibelius". Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  5. ↑ "Sibelius is in crisis!". Retrieved 29 July 2012.
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