Sam Butler and Joe Plazak join Philip Rothman and David MacDonald on the podcast. Sam is Avid’s director of product management for audio software, and Joe is the product owner and principal software engineer for Sibelius. Together, they led the team that brought Sibelius to the iPad for the first time, and we hear all about their journey that began nearly a decade ago with the goal of making Sibelius available on as many platforms as possible.

We talk about the key concepts, keypads, and key signature tools in Sibelius on iPad — all of which unlocked the doors to making the software work on a tablet device. As you can tell, we have some fun, but also get serious about the technical and design challenges that arose during this project, and we  learn how they found solutions that, in time, will benefit the desktop and other devices like touch-enabled Windows computers.

Sam and Joe tell us what we can expect from Sibelius in the near future as its iPad features appear in forthcoming desktop updates. They also give us a glimpse into the years ahead as they ramp up their team and look to improve the user experience across all areas of the program — from licensing and activation, to entering some notes on a staff, all the way to creating full scores that you can share with anyone.

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