Sibelius Software releases Sibelius 5, a major update to its extremely powerful composition software. New features abound, including the ideas hub, panorama, and a host of others.

For users wishing to try their hand at new styles of music and for music students, the Ideas Hub makes it easier to capture, tag, find, and combine musical ideas. What the ideas hub essentially allows you to do is take musical ideas, label them, and move them into a score with proper transposition and tempo. This is very similar to ACID or groove looping in other programs, but it is interesting to see it in the context of a composition-based software.

New to the software package, also, is the Sibelius Sounds Essentials collection. This 2 BG collection of sounds is comprised of high-quality audio from libraries including Garritan, SonicVox, and Tapspace. Added to this is Sibelius 5's full support of VST and Audio Units plug-ins for the first time. This enables the users to playback full-quality sample banks of the East West Quantum Orchestra or the Vienna Symphonic Sound Library. Kontakt 2 is included to help wrangle the samples.

A great advantage that Sibelius has when it comes to composition is its ability to handle articulations, accents, and hairpins with extreme ease. To greater improve this ability, SoundWorld provides a new way of categorizing sounds that guarantees Sibelius always picks the most suitable sound for any device.

Panorama, another new feature, offers a clear view of music that enables the user to compose faster, revise easier, and analyze entire pieces of composition. The music is shown in a single, wide strip, allowing you to ignore layout until printing time.

Easy cue and Instrument Change are two new features that allow you to make more intuitive decisions about where a cue change should happen. With Easy Cue, a user selects a section of music they want to cue, copies it to the clipboard, and uses the new Paste as cue function to produce a cue that fits the composition. Version 5 will even recommend cue locations. Instrument Change allows you to change instruments mid-staff, which comes in handy when you need to go from a clarinet to bass clarinet.

A fantastic new font for staff composition, Reprise, creates a realistic simulation of hand-copying music, plus you can produce chord symbols. Sibelius also now has 80 different available plug-ins, which the user can undo, if need be.

The list price for is £595, and can be obtained for Windows and Mac OSX. Demo versions are available on the website.