David W. Fenton wrote:
On 20 Jun 2004 at 18:00, Darcy James Argue wrote:
I agree that Finale should do this without having to resort to third-party plugins. But there are any number of things Finale ought
to do, chiefly among them (IMO) *not* corrupt my files when I'm
working on multiple simultaneous documents and *not* overwrite one
file with a different file. In the meanwhile, though, provided you
can get Mass Copy working on your machine, it does exactly what you
want it to do.
Well, I'm pretty pissed off about Finale right now.
It seems to be getting worse in terms of brokenness.
And I am discovering more and more things that have been broken for a very long time.
I'm ready to move on if Sibelius is even remotely usable.
Sibelius IS definitely remotely usable. It does a great job for a majority of engraving issues. It will require a drastic change in thought processes from what Finale requires, so there is definitely a learning curve.
There is a downloadable demo you can try, plus I strongly urge you to join the Sibelius yahoogroup and get a flavor for the the complaints, the praises, the workarounds and the level of support. Sibelius has a representative on the list who does provide a lot of support and gives definite contacts at Sibelius.com for problems he can't provide support for. Much of his support, though, stems from the corporate paranoia over piracy -- if it is in the manual (he wrote it, so he knows where things are even if none of the rest of us can find it because of poor indexing) he will merely cite the page to look it up in. Anybody who is a legitimate user of the program has a copy of the manual, so that's all the support he gives. But if it's a matter of describing the clicking-order or explaining how things work, he does outline the processes in the messages.
It is interesting to note that there are many, many parallels between the Sibelius group and this Finale list:
1) complaints about things that used to work but now don't work anymore are numerous;
2) explanations of devious workarounds for things that should be straightforward are numerous;
3) blind praise for the program in the form of "I have been doing that for years and if you don't like the process go use Finale" are numerous;
4) simple problems that are easily resolved by telling users where menu items got moved to between versions are numerous;
5) there are many many instances of users helping users;
6) there are as many workarounds in Sibelius as in Finale, they're just for different things.
Sibelius is used by a lot of professional engravers, just as Finale is. It can produce gorgeous output just as Finale can, or it can produce ugly output just as Finale can.
I haven't been able to get my head around how Sibelius forces me to work, so I am sticking with Finale.
But when my level of frustration with Finale outpaces my level of frustration with Sibelius, I'll make the jump.
Be forewarned, though, about Sibelius' claim to "import Finale files!"
It requires you to save the Finale files in ETF, and it won't recognize the most recent Finale versions at all. And when it does the importing, it loses a lot of the formatting, so that is evidence that Sibelius, just like MakeMusic, makes wild claims that it can't live up to.
And it, too, packages useless bells and whistles such as music scanning. If you want to REALLY scan music, you have to upgrade the scanning software to the full Pro (read that as expensive) version.
It, too, suffers from code bloat with each version.
But it can definitely produce great output, once you learn it, same as with Finale.
Download the demo and check it out!
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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