UPDATE February 2010: After an extended project, I have just upgraded from Sibelius 4 to Sibelius 6.1. The issue I chronicle here is resolved automatically by the "Show Courtesy Accidentals" feature of the new version.

Ever since I bought Sibelius music notation software v.1.2, and even now with v.4.0.0 build 23, I've had problems with Sibelius's notation of accidentals at the ends of ties. Getting accidentals notated correctly is important: it saves time and money in rehearsals. I first brought this matter to Sibelius.com's attention shortly after I got the product.

The rules for correct notation of accidentals at the ends of ties are simple. There are two cases:

1. The tie is entirely within one system, in which case the accidental is not shown at the right end of the tie.
2. The tie crosses a system break, in which case, if the pitch class is not in the key signature, the accidental must be shown on the notehead at the end of the tie.

Sibelius does not do this automatically. You can do it manually, one note at a time.

Here is a passage, formatted the way Sibelius does it automatically. It conflicts with Rule 2 of how to notate accidentals.

You can, of course, manually fix it, like this:

All is well again. Until something causes the music to be re-formatted, in which case it may well be worse. In this case, m.74 will get pushed down onto the first line of our example, thus causing a violation of Rule 2 again in m.76, and a violation of Rule 1 in m.77.

The workaround is, of course, to manually go through the part one last time, searching out tied notes and correcting their notation.

When I first brought this matter to Sibelius.Com's attention in the late 1990s, in a move reminiscient of some of the poorer technical support from Finale.com, they hinted I was daft for caring strongly about it. At the time, I suggested that were it possible to detect the first-bar-of-new-system condition from the ManuScript programming language, I'd build a macro to correct all the ties in a score myself. The reply I got at the time was that since the start of new system was a dynamically calculated thing, it wasn't the sort of thing they were ever going to expose to a read-only property, and besides, this sort of notational fix is the sort of thing best done directly in the application code itself... and they'd think about it.

The ManuScript language provides a Breaktype readwrite property of the Bar object, but the documentation indicates that the number stored there indicates a rule for how a bar is allowed to be formatted, not the current position of a bar.

With recent versions of Sibelius, a new feature, Dynamic Parts, has been released and heavily promoted as a time-saving measure. It involves making parts as filtered views upon a score. But system breaks in the part and the score are frequently bound to be different. Whenever that happens, fixing a violation of Rule 1 in the score will cause a violation of Rule 2 in the part, and vice versa. So Dynamic Parts are useless to me because they force wrong notation. Wrong notation wastes players' time.

A semi-tenable workaround for Dynamic Parts is to accept horrific note-spacing in the parts in order to make all parts and the score have all the same system breaks. Now, with the old technology of separate part files, I can still get correct notation all around. But Dynamic Parts would be a great idea--if they didn't make wrong notation.

--Matthew H. Fields, D.M.A.