To get started publishing your scores to Sibelius Cloud Publishing, you must
first gather your scores into a format that Sibelius Cloud Publishing
understands. It will come as no surprise to learn that we support native
Sibelius files (.sib and .sco). We also support MusicXML (.xml
and .mxl) and PDF (.pdf) files.

How to decide on which format to use

The decision is a simple trade-off between the time taken to get the
score into one of the supported formats and the time taken to edit it
subsequently.

It’s also important to consider the experience that you want to present to your
end users: In today’s world, providing a rich, interactive experience can
really set your digital sheet music publishing business apart! Some features
are not available in PDF-based files - for example, playback. That’s
because the PDF doesn’t contain any playback data from which Sibelius Cloud
publishing can generate audio.

It’s fine to use a variety of score formats, depending on your needs. You
may for example have a large catalogue of scores in PDF format from before the
days that computerised music notation apps came to be, and it may simply be
too time consuming to re-input these scores in Sibelius. As a first step, you
may choose to publish those scores directly as PDFs. As it becomes clearer
which of your scores are the most popular with your users, you may wish to
transfer that score to Sibelius, so that you can provide a richer
user experience.

Using Sibelius

Sibelius Cloud Publishing, as you might expect, supports native Sibelius files
(.sib and .sco). You can use Sibelius as normal to create your scores,
which you can then publish to the Internet using Sibelius Cloud Publishing.

Using Sibelius to create scores is of course a topic in its own right! Here are
some pointers that may help:

• For new users, the Get Started Fast with Sibelius videos on AvidBlogs provide
  a great introduction. Expert users may find a few handy tidbits there too!
• For expert users, the best place to look is the Sibelius Reference itself. If
  you find that your question is still unanswered, there is a friendly community
  of expert Sibelius users over on the Sibelius forum.

We provide copies of Sibelius as part of your Sibelius Cloud
Publishing agreement.

Using other notation applications

Sibelius Cloud Publishing supports MusicXML, allowing you to use other
notation applications such as Finale, MuseScore or Notion to create scores that
you may then publish online using Sibelius Cloud Publishing.

It’s possible to either use MusicXML directly as an input format, but depending
on the results you achieve you may wish to open the file in Sibelius itself.
You may then make some edits (only a few, if any, should be necessary) and then
publish the resulting .sib file instead. Don’t forget that Sibelius includes
batch processing plug-ins for converting whole folders of scores at once,
which can really help in taking the legwork out of the process.

PDFs

Many publishers have extensive back catalogues as a library of PDFs. You may
publish your PDFs directly to Sibelius Cloud Publishing.

There are some disadvantages to publishing using PDF: since the PDF contains no
musical data, playback and transposition features are disabled.

For the best user experience, we do recommend transferring your PDF scores into
Sibelius - of course this may not be practical (especially if you have
thousands of scores in your library!), but a methodical approach to converting
your scores from PDF can pay dividends in score sales.

If you do decide to convert a PDF file into Sibelius format, you have two
options:

• Input the score manually using Sibelius - oftentimes this is the fastest
  method.
• Scan your score using PhotoScore - Sibelius comes with a free copy of
  PhotoScore Lite, and there the more advanced PhotoScore Ultimate is also
  available for purchase. As the original Sibelius Internet Edition Reference
  puts it: “Scanning is not a universal panacea”. Sometimes you’ll find that
  the time you must take to correct scanning errors outweighs the any time saved
  in scanning the score in the first place.

Other applications and formats

MIDI

It’s worth noting that you may also convert MIDI files (.mid) to publish
scores in Sibelius Cloud Publishing, since you can open the MIDI file directly
in Sibelius and subsequently save it as a native Sibelius file.

MIDI files contain only information about the sound of the music - not
its notation. It’s likely therefore that you’ll find you need to clean up your
score in Sibelius before it’s ready for publishing.

Other notation formats

If you need to support other formats, please ask and we’ll add it
to our wish list!