Users who are not already in the Sibelius ecosystem will find themselves hamstrung by the limitations of the app and its impenetrable UI pretty much from the off, and they will also be confused by the asymmetry of the subscription offering: if you subscribe to Sibelius Ultimate, say, via Avid’s web store for $19.99 per month, you get access both to Sibelius on the desktop and on the iPad.
If you already have an active Sibelius subscription, you can use the Sibelius app for iPad at no additional charge, and that’s really who will benefit from this app.
These are all good things! But the (apparently patent pending) note input method that involves using the hard press gesture with the Pencil and then tilting it left and right to change the note’s duration and up and down to change its accidental is really fiddly, time-consuming, and uncomfortable to do repeatedly. Sibelius has nice support for native iOS features like multi-tasking, standard system gestures for cut/copy/paste etc., and it also supports the Apple Pencil. All of these things, and many more besides, require you to have Sibelius on the desktop. You have basic access to things like page and staff size, but otherwise basically no control over the appearance of your score. You cannot use an external MIDI keyboard. You cannot view parts, you cannot view Panorama, you cannot tweak playback or indeed play with anything other than the included sounds.
The functionality of the app is almost completely hidden (if I were feeling less charitable, I would say “undiscoverable”), hiding 99% of it behind the new “Command Search” feature that was added to the desktop version earlier this year, so if you know what you’re looking for, you can find it by searching for it by name, but if you don’t, you will literally be unable to use the app. The Sibelius app seems pretty clearly to be targeted only at existing Sibelius users, since it’s basically impossible to start and finish a project in the app, even if you pay $12.49 per month for the Ultimate tier.Īlthough you can have a score with as many staves as you like, you are limited in which instruments you can create and which notations you can create. It’s striking how we and Avid have come at the proposition of producing an iPad app in ostensibly opposite directions.
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