It is still possible to buy a perpetual license for Sibelius, but you have to buy it from a third party vendor like sweetwater.com or some other vendor as Avid doesn't seem to offer the perpetual license for sale from their website directly.

With this perpetual version Avid provides updates for only 1 year and if you opt to not renew and pay the yearly subscription, your Sibelius installation will remain where it's at with whatever version you have right before the subscription runs out.

As was mentioned in another post here, the Avid Application Manager can cause a multitude of frustrations and headaches. There is a way to eliminate the problem which I've been using since 2018 and it's been fine for me on a Mac, but I don't know what the solution would be for a Sibelius installation on a Windows computer. For anyone who has Sibelius on an Apple computer who finds Avid's Application Manager app to be annoying and problematic, here is the fix I used:

Follow these steps:

• Go to Mac HD/Library/LaunchAgents
• Then right click on the file called com.avid.ApplicationManager.plist file and open it with Text Edit
• Change the RunAtLoad key to false
• Then use Save As and place it on your Desktop, it may add the word 'copy' to the end of the name.
• Click on the name to edit it and change the name so that the entry is called com.avid.ApplicationManager. plist file it may prompt you and ask you if you wish to add the plist extension, if it does then say yes.
• Now drag the updated file back into Mac HD/Library/LaunchAgents where it came from, it will ask if you want to replace or keep both, say replace then you will be prompted for your password.
• Enter you password to complete the copy process.

That's it - now Avid Application Manager will not launch on you Mac unless you want it to. You'll find it in the Applications folder and if you wish you can make another shortcut to the dock.