Sibelius is shipping a major upgrade to its flagship software for composing, arranging, publishing, teaching, and learning music. Sibelius 5 (Mac/Win, $599; $329 educational; upgrades $169, $129 educational) features new built-in sounds, innovative techniques for viewing music, support for audio plug-ins, and many more new features.

Built on Kontakt Player 2, the Sibelius Sounds Essentials library supplies more than 150 pitched and hundreds of percussion sounds, as well as the full General MIDI set, from leading soundware developers such as Garritan and SoniVox. You can expand your instrumental palette further by adding AU and VST instruments and mixing and processing them with effects plug-ins using Sibelius's redesigned mixer. The new SoundWorld feature ensures that Sibelius will always choose the most suitable sound available. A new music font called Reprise simulates hand-copied music, and Sibelius 5 can show chord symbols and supplies symbols for early music and avant-garde.

Sibelius 5's Ideas Hub provides an easy way to capture, tag, locate, organize, and assemble your musical ideas. It gives you a place to store musical snippets and access them whenever you need inspiration. An idea can be a musical passage of any length and for any number of instruments. You can edit and tag your ideas with keywords for later use as compositional building blocks. Ideas Hub comes with more than 2,000 ready-made ideas that you and your students can use and reuse in a variety of musical genres.

The new Paste As Cue command lets you copy and paste any section of music, and Sibelius does the rest. For example, it makes the cue appear small, puts it in a suitable voice, and transposes it if necessary. The feature even suggests cue locations and proofreads them for you. Sibelius 5's Panorama offers a wide view of your music in a single scrolling window, enabling easy revision and clearer analysis of entire pieces. Other enhancements are improved layout control, easy instrument changes, new tool plug-ins, and easier network installation. Sibelius Software Ltd.; tel. (925) 280-0600; email infoUSA@sibelius.com; Web www.sibelius.com.