The most apparent change is a new user interface with dockable, tabbed panels. The design borrows heavily from Microsoft’s Office Ribbon, though a more subdued appearance makes it look just as comfortable on the Mac. My guess is that power users may just hide the whole thing and stick to keyboard shortcuts, but it should do wonders for discoverability for new users or more casual users not comfortable with that.
I don’t know how to read music and probably never will, so I’ll leave this one to Peter, who I respect a lot.
Reading through the What’s New document (hub.sibelius…sibelius700-whatsnew-en.pdf) it looks like the majority of the improvements are in the UI. That’s a good thing. The UI was getting pretty long in the tooth and needed some updating. I’m not crazy about the fact that they adopted the Ribbon. None of my co-workers who use Office likes it. But I’ll give it a try. And I’m happy they’ve added optimization for single-screen systems. Sometimes I use my MacBook Pro to enter notes.
I’m not sure why Peter Kirn thinks being a 64-bit application might make Sibelius faster. It merely allows it to access more memory. The What’s New specifically says that the main benefit to Sibelius is the ability to address large sound libraries. But the new huge library should be pretty cool. (And something that would be entirely impractical to buy from the Mac App Store. Good thing I still have an optical drive!)
Looks like there are some good improvements to note entry. They’ve made entering tuplets less of a nightmare. Slurs and other lines will now extend to new notes until you tell it to stop. That will be a time-saver.
The text system got a complete overhaul. It was about time for that, too.
This looks like a really solid upgrade. Version 6 was a major advancement in the notation tools, especially the Magnetic Layout. That made creating a good-looking score take about half the time. Now in version 7 it looks like they’ve updated a lot of the ancillary capabilities.
I’ll definitely be buying this upgrade.
Actually, I said specifically that I didn’t know that it would have an impact on performance. Now, being natively 64-bit *does* give you a marginal improvement in computation; I just wasn’t sure if there was anywhere you’d be able to see that. (Maybe in some especially large or complex score…)
But yes, you’re right — main advantage is memory access for sample libraries!
Oh, and Jim — it’s not too late to learn to read music! 🙂