Q: I spent far too long today trying to install a Sibelius plug-in after I downloaded it. I followed the Sibelius site instructions, but it still didn’t work. I’m using Sibelius 6 on Windows 7. Can you help?

I have upgraded from Sibelius 7.5 to 8.4 today. I have installed vienna ensemble again and placed the VST plugin and I have added that VST folder in the Audio engine options. I have also put the soundmap in the AvidSibeliusSounds folder. Vienna ensemble still doesn't show up among the available devices. Does anyone know what can be the problem? I'm confused by the way the software creates its own folders and Plugin folder which are different to the VST Plugin folder within Sibelius 7 (in both its locations). I'm also having a problem getting the Vienna soundsets and fxp and viframe files to be recognized - I thought I had put them in the right folders of Sounds and Playback. Re: Recommendations for VST's for Sibelius - Credo, 22 Jul 03:39PM Re: Recommendations for VST's for Sibelius - Credo, 23 Jul 12:20PM Re: Recommendations for VST's for Sibelius - Credo, 20 Jul 03:50PM Re: Recommendations for VST's for Sibelius - dsw67, 20 Jul 04:10PM Re: Recommendations for VST's for Sibelius - Rob Tuley, 20 Jul 04:22PM. Free download, free downloads, download, downloads, descargar, descarga, descargar gratis, descarga gratis, vst, vsti, virtual instrument DSK Overture DSK Music January 25th, 2012 Romplers (real instruments) Virtual Instruments 274 Comments ». Install New Plugin. Version 02.02.00 Added 08 May 2010 (last updated 03 Jul 2018) For use with Sibelius 6, Sibelius 7.1, Sibelius 7.5, Sibelius 8.x, Sibelius 18.x and Sibelius 19.x. Moves a Sibelius plugin file, which is typically downloaded and unzipped from the Sibelius Plugin Download page, into a subfolder of your user plugins folder. NotePerformer's string sections are created by stacking solo players using section-building technology, allowing near infinite variations in sound—NotePerformer also contains a comprehensive range of woodwinds and brass instruments, British-style brass band, pitched and unpitched percussion, saxophones, piano, harpsichord, theremin, accordions, a pipe organ with multiple stops, guitars.

A: In addition to the plugins that ship with Sibelius, there are now more than 400 additional plug-ins available for download from the Sibelius web site. A number of these plugins very likely could become indispensable to you, once you’ve tried them out.

A nice feature of Sibelius 7.03 and later is the new Install Plug-ins dialog, which provides an automatic means to download and install any of these plug-ins directly into the software, so it’s really easy to try them out. Check out this blog post by Daniel Spreadbury and also this YouTube tutorial by Philip Rothman.

However, if you want to install plugins for Sibelius 6 (or earlier), the process is completely manual. You need to put Plug-ins in a specific directory for Sibelius to recognize them:

  • Window 7 or Vista: C:UsersusernameAppDataRoaming
  • Mac OSX: /Library/Application Support/Sibelius Software/

Also, it’s important to note that when you download plug-ins, they are in compressed .zip format. You will need to un-compress the file before it will be recognized by Sibelius. Sibelius plug-ins have a “.plg” extension.

Your web browser may unzip these automatically, but if they don’t, you may need a utility for this purpose. On Mac, simply double click on the archive to uncompress it.

For both Mac and Windows, after installing a plugin, you will need to close and restart Sibelius before it will be recognized.

Avid’s website has a walkthrough for installation titled “How to install plug-ins” which shows the file paths for both Windows and Mac. A little more detail is provided here to help you.

WINDOWS INSTRUCTIONS (courtesy of Bob Zawalich)

For Sibelius 6 on Windows 7, use the Windows Vista instructions from the Avid website, and so start at

Best free reverb vst. C:UsersusernameAppDataRoaming

(assuming your Users folder is on drive C, which is almost always the case.)

Sometimes the user files are hidden, and you have to make them visible. If you have problems with the folders being hidden you might have a look at this tutorial. Scroll down to the part about the hidden protected operating system folders.

The path to my Sib 6 plugins folder on Windows 7 is:

C:UsersBobAppDataRoamingSibelius SoftwareSibelius 6Plugins

If you install a plugin you will need to create at least one folder under
“Plugins”, such as

C:UsersBobAppDataRoamingSibelius SoftwareSibelius 6PluginsDownloads

Do not put your plugins in the Plugins folder itself, but in a subfolder of that folder.

MAC OSX

First, check out Avid’s plug-in install instructions. More options and details:

Type COMMAND-N to create a New Finder Window. Select your Home Folder, which appears underneath the Places section In the Finder.

Locate and double click on the Library folder. Now, locate and double click on the Application Support folder.

Inside Application Support, locate and double click the Sibelius Software folder. If there isn’t already a folder called Sibelius Software in this location, (choose File > New Folder), name it Sibelius Software, then go inside it.

Inside the Sibelius Software folder, you should see a folder called Sibelius 6.
If there is already a folder called Plugins within in this folder, double-click it to go inside it; if not, create a new folder, label it Plugins, then go inside it.

If you are fairly sure these folders all exist, choose Go > Go To Folder from the main Finder menu. Now you can simply type in the full path above preceded by a tilde, like this:

~/Library/Application Support/Sibelius Software/Sibelius 6/Plugins.

You can also type the first part of the directory string to get you inside the Application Support folder, like this:

~/Library/Application Support.

Click Go to navigate to that location.

FOLDERS = MENU ITEMS

Plugins in Sibelius are organized into specific categories related to common workflow, which appear as menu items in Sibelius 6.

If you want a plug-in to appear in one of the existing sub-menus in the Plug-ins menu in Sibelius, be sure to create a folder with the exact same name as the sub-menu itself. Otherwise, create a folder called anything you like: this will appear as a new sub-menu in Sibelius when you next run it.

Here are some examples of the default folder names which correspond to the default Plug-ins menu:

  • Articulations
  • Arrange
  • Chord Symbols
  • Notes and Rests
  • Playback
  • Text

Vst Plugins Best Free Download

As mentioned above, you can also add your own folders and name them anything you’d like. These new folders will show up as a new “category” or menu item in Sibelius 6. For instance, I have a folder labeled “Engraver”, to which I’ve added these plug-ins:

  • Add LV Symbols to Notes
  • Note Spacing
  • Position Dynamics
  • Respace Clef Change

These are plugins which I typically use when working for a publisher, for instance.

I urge you to visit the Avid website and download and try some of the many amazing plugins currently available, many of which add a great deal of functionality to older versions of Sibelius, such as Sibelius 6.

for Wenda Zonnefeld, with thanks to Bob Zawalich for his tips for installation on Windows.

Everybody loves lists, so I’m told. So here’s a list of five extra plug-ins available for download from the Sibelius web site that you should consider adding to your copy of Sibelius today.

1. Narrow Two Voices

Sibelius automatically aligns notes in two voices, and when they interlock, it positions them “stem-to-stem”. Some publishers and engravers prefer interlocking notes to be positioned “head-to-head.” You can see the difference between these two conventions below:

If you prefer the look of the example on the right, then Narrow Two Voices is the plug-in for you. It can automate the manual positioning of notes required to achieve “head-to-head” alignment, and also has a few other tricks up its sleeve: Sibelius doesn’t always get voice positioning right in all circumstances, particularly for unison whole notes (semibreves) in two voices, and for dotted versus non-dotted unison notes. Narrow Two Voices can fix these problems up automatically too.

2. Multirests and Empty Bars

One of the common problems people have when preparing instrumental parts in Sibelius is that the multirests (sometimes called multimeasure rests, or consolidated rests) unexpectedly break at a particular barline. There’s always a good reason for this — Sibelius only breaks multirests at things like double barlines, rehearsal marks, changes of time signature, key or tempo, etc. — but that reason may not always be obvious. For example, you may have a text object containing only spaces in that bar, or possibly you have created a whole note (semibreve) rest rather than a bar rest.

Sibelius comes with a great plug-in for spotting this kind of problem, and many others, which you’ll find at Plug-ins > Proof-reading > What is Where, but sometimes that can seem like a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Try downloading Multirests and Empty Bars instead: it’s a simpler plug-in that only sets out to tell you why a particular bar might not be consolidated into a multirest.

3. Lower & Raise Pitch Chromatically

The shortcuts for moving notes up and down in Sibelius are incredibly simple: up arrow moves a note up a diatonic step, and down arrow moves it down a diatonic step. But what if you want to move a note up or down by a chromatic step? In that case, you have to do it yourself: either add an accidental, or move the note up or down a diatonic step and then add an accidental. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do this in just one step?

Best Vst Plugin For Sibelius Windows

Why, yes it would, and Lower & Raise Pitch Chromatically is just the ticket. This is one of those plug-ins to which it’s very useful to assign a keyboard shortcut: make sure you’re using Sibelius 5.2.5 or later, which makes assigning shortcuts to plug-ins much simpler than in earlier versions. See Menus and shortcuts in Help > Sibelius Reference for help with assigning a shortcut.

4. Fix PhotoScore Lyrics

PhotoScore is one of the marvels of the modern age. It takes printed sheet music and turns it into editable sheet music, by way of your scanner. But it is not without its flaws, and one of the more problematic ones is with lyrics. When you import a PhotoScore file with lyrics into Sibelius, you’ll find that lyric hyphens — used to separate syllables onto different notes — are glued to the end of the syllables that they should follow, rather than floating beautifully between one syllable and the next. To fix this up, you have to manually edit all of the lyrics, removing the hyphen from the end of the lyric and typing it back in yourself.

Or there’s another way: use the Fix PhotoScore Lyrics plug-in, and this whole process takes a couple of seconds. Make this part of your routine when you scan vocal or choral scores.

Best Vst Plugin For Sibelius Music

5. Go To

Best Vst Plugin For Sibelius Download

Sibelius has useful navigation features, including Go to Bar and Go to Page, but it doesn’t currently have some other things that might be useful, e.g. to go to a particular rehearsal mark, or bar number change, or dynamic.

Well, fret no more: the Go To plug-in makes these kinds of navigation effortless. Don’t forget to assign a keyboard shortcut to this new plug-in for maximum effectiveness!

That’s it!

Free Vst Plugins

There you have it: five useful plug-ins that will save you hours. Do you have any other favourite plug-ins? Let me know by leaving me a comment or dropping me an email.