Improvements to slurs in Sibelius 6.1

The recently-released Sibelius 6.1 free update is more than just a collection of bug fixes. My favourite improvement in this update is to slurs, which are now fully integrated with the new Magnetic Layout feature so that they can avoid collisions along their whole length. My colleague David Bignell worked tirelessly to fine-tune the behaviour so that slurs move intelligently out of the way when they collide with notes, articulations, accidentals and other objects, and the end result is so good that it has to be seen to be believed.

Here are some examples. Prior to v6.1, it was common to find slurs colliding with accidentals:

In v6.1, Magnetic Layout fixes this automatically:

Phrase marks over rising and falling passages were very ugly by default in earlier versions:

See how v6.1 elegantly solves this problem by increasing the curvature of the slur and moving the endpoints a little:


Adjusting slur arcs manually was always a slightly fiddly business, and can now be avoided entirely in most cases, saving you a massive amount of time when entering your score and making the score much more readable by default. I recently played a concert where the parts were prepared slightly hurriedly in an earlier version of Sibelius, and I couldn't help being distracted by several slur / accidental collisions. It's nice to think that these will no longer occur.