William Roberts quoted the Sibelius website
"You must provide proof of ownership of Finale, Encore, or Mosaic by mailing the first and second pages of your table of contents in your user manual or send us your original program CD."
in response to my comment
It occurs to me, too, that Sibelius, in order to obtain the competitive upgrade requires you to send them your MakeMusic! distribution disk.and I would say in my defense that since I did not begin with Finale until 2k, I do not even have a user's manual from which to provide a first or second page.
Well, true enough, I would have it backwards, except that I was specifically writing to one who was already (presumably) a registered Finale user. As such, I expected that he would need the disk (or manual pages) to get the Sibelius upgrade, but not the Finale one."Mail the form, your Master Disk from a qualifying program and send to MakeMusic!"
So to get a crossgrade to Finale, you *do* have to send the CD. You've got it all backwards, Noel!
(And all this stuff about the ETF file format being great because it's published: unless you're an accomplished programmer, you're never going to be able to make sense of the ETF format. Have you looked at one latetly? Not exactly human-readable! And where exactly are the details of the format published? Can you point me to a web site where I can download the details of the format? If the information *is* freely-available, it's not well-publicised!Yes, I've looked at an ~.etf file, and I agree it's not exactly human readable, but the information is provided there so that one with sufficient training and experience can produce a filter to read the file, exactly as Sibelius has done. By contrast, according to Sibelius themselves, the file format used om their data files is proprietary. As such, as I understand the digital millenium copyright act, it is illegal for you to attempt to reverse engineer the file to gain access to your own data.
A much better format for storing data from notation applications in an application-independent way would be something like MusicXML. Both Finale and Sibelius have export filters available for MusicXML as plug-ins, and because MusicXML *is* a published format and more or less human-readable to boot, I'd say it's much more suitable than ETF. I don't work for the MusicXML folks, by the way.)My problem with the MusicXML solution is a philosophical one. I want my software (whether word processors, spreadsheets, or in this case, notation programs) to have a native capability to store data in a file whose has a file formats are published; I don't want to go have to take recourse to a third party plug in to store my data in a public data format, however good it might be.
Another point that informed my decision to stay with Finale is that MakeMusic! is a publicly traded company, a result of which is a statutory requirement for public disclosure of financial data according to stated standards of accouting. Sibelius is a privately held firm, and while financial information might be available from some source (Dun and Bradstreet, or it's UK equivalent?) I found MakeMusic!'s financial information in a matter of seconds, and was unable to find any significnat financial information on Sibelius with the expenditure of a couple of orders of magnitude more time.
ns
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