Listsibs: I have been following with some interest the discussion of a competition using different notation software packages, and have come to the conclusion that in the evaluation of different software packages to solve a problem in general, the questions fundamentally resolve to three:
The first question is "What will the software do?". After all, a given notation software package can either deal with a spiral staff, or it won't (and for the purposes of this discussion, creating a graphics image and importing it as such is defined as not dealing with the spiral staff); it either allows the use of alternative software fonts, or it doesn't; it either allows the user to specify the location of a particular graphics image, or it doesn't; it either includes a "find and replace" feature in its text editor, or it doesn't. Since this category is entirely objective, it should be possible to prepare a list of capabilities of various software packages, perhaps by exhaustively listing the capabilities users would want the software to accomplish, and make the determination based upon which software can do more things that users want. At the other end of the spectrum, the question "How easy is the task accomplished using the software?" is entirely subjective, and different users will have different answers to the same question. For example, in some performing editions of older choral music it is common to see a brief quotation of each part in the original notation, to the left of the brace of the first system of the piece. I know I can do this in Finale: I can create a font in which the notation elements (clefs, time signature, note and rest shapes) of the old style are used in place of their modern equivalents; as I've worked out the "how" thus far, though, it's not necessarily easy, and based upon very preliminary conversations with Sibelius users, it may not even be possible. Several weeks ago, I posted a question in several email lists where there is a population of S.~ users, asking if it was possible to use split stems for altered unisons, which Finale will do (though it's not necessarily "easy"); no one responded that it was indeed possible in Sibelius leading me to suspect that it may not be. For the "typical" user of a notation software package (and I would submit that, by definition, a "typical user" does not subscribe to an email list devoted to discussion of notation software), the real question is not what a package will do, but how easy it is to accomplish something with the package. If you select from a particular universe the 20 percent of the things that people want to accomplish 80 percent of the time, and make them easy to accomplish, you'll make points. I understand that this may be what S~ did; my impression is that there are more things that are not possible to accomplish with S~ than with Finale, but many of the things Sibelius does are easier to accomplish than the same thing with Finale. Finally, it occurs to me that one way to measure which is the better software package is to solicit a "want list" from dedicated users of both packages, and compare the want lists to see which of the things on the Finale want list are already "do-able" with S~, and vice versa. ns _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
