An avid viewer

Last week I had the fateful email. A company that I had known for some years has been swallowed by a larger one, never to be seen again. Actually that might be a bit dramatic since I’m talking about Sibelius, which has been successfully selling a superb music notation suite for some years, and it has been bought by Avid, a big player in the commercial “digital media” arena.

I’ve been an admittedly occasional user of the Sibelius music notation program, but every time I come to it I’m impressed. My main worry in the takeover is that the Sibelius product will be submerged in Avid’s attempt to reach the educational market. Sibelius has always felt like a musician’s tool, not just a computer program. The people who wrote it clearly understood music, and not just 1’s and 0’s. I will of course attempt to suspend judgement until I see version 5 and ultimately version 6 of Sibelius…