How to activate Sibelius

When you have purchased and downloaded Sibelius or Sibelius Ultimate and open the application for the first time, you will be greeted by this dialogue box:

Press “Continue Trial” if you are not yet ready to activate the programme or want to get started as soon as possible.
The programme is fully functional in the trial version for 30 days, i.e. you can write sheet music and archive it, but after 30 days you can no longer save your sheet music files and must activate the programme.
When you are ready to activate Sibelius, click “Activate”, which will take you to the “Avid Link” utility, where you will see the tabs Profile, Home, Products etc. Select Profile and log in to your Avid account with your email and password. If everything goes smoothly, Avid Link will now retrieve the necessary System and Activation ID codes from your account and activate the programme.
The process can take 10 seconds, but in some cases it can take several minutes, so be patient.

If you have multiple products in your account (e.g. previous versions), the automatic activation will not work. Instead, select the Products tab and click Sibelius Ultimate. 

Click on the arrow to the right and select the submenu “Licence”

Click “Use License” to activate the licence. IMPORTANT! If you want to use Sibelius on two computers at the same time, Click “take offline” before you click “use licence”. If “take offline” is not ticked, you can use Sibelius on more than two computers, but not at the same time. When you switch to a new computer, you can log in to Avid Link and Sibelius will be activated until you log in on the next computer. With “Take Offline” you lock the licence to one computer and you can do this on up to two computers. The “Take Offline” option is not always available 

It is also possible to activate without being logged in to Avid Link. You must then enter System ID and Activation in the respective fields.

To find your System and Activation ID, open your web browser (e.g. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.), go to Avid.com, log in to your account, select View My Products and click “View Software Download links”. You will see something like the following image:

Below Perpetual Product is your System ID and Activation ID. You can copy the 2 IDs separately and paste them into the respective fields in Avid Link.
Avid Link should then announce that Sibelius is “successfully activated”.

IMPORTANT!
If you replace your computer, send it in for repair, format the hard drive or make other major changes, you must first deactivate Sibelius in Avid Link under the Products tab. In principle, you can deactivate and activate the programme as often as you like, but Sibelius can only be activated on 2 computers at the same time.

Errors in capitalisation
Sibelius cannot be opened even though it says “Activated”. If you had an older licence that has expired, Avid Link may activate the old version and you will receive an error message stating that your licence has expired. In Avid Link, click on the tab with the three dots (just below “Profile”) and select “sync account”.

You will be logged out of Avid Link and when you log back in, Avid Link will activate the correct licence, if it still fails, log out of Avid Link and activate using the method where you manually enter System ID and Activation ID as described above.

Offline activation
If your Sibelius computer can't get online, or if the above methods don't work, you can activate using the offline method instead.
For example, this may be necessary if your computer is behind a municipal firewall that blocks the ports used by Avid Link.
The procedure is described in the Avid Link User Guide page 13.