Ken Durling wrote: [snip]>
Sib's UI is not dreadful Far from it. It works wonderfully and is very flexible. But it takes tine to learn. I'm still trying to find time to pursue finding my way around Finale better. Neither program is perfect, and layout is one of the tougher issues in Sibelius. But I'm not going to call either program awful because I just haven't learned how to use it! .
This is something that every user of either program needs to remember when trying the competition.
I have been using Finale for 12 years (I think, starting with version 3.5) and I remember coming from MusicPrinterPlus and having a slow beginning to get comfortable with Finale. I know David Fenton has been using Finale longer because he was already resident on this list when I joined, shortly after I started with Finale. It took me a while to get comfortable with the working methods that Finale forced me to use. And then I got very comfortable with them, to the point that I can fly with the program now, doing music entry very fast and comfortable and being able to solve most of my notational problems myself, only rarely consulting the on-line documentation or asking questions on this list.
When I started using Sibelius I found it extremely frustrating because I didn't take the time to find where things are in the menus. Of course, Finale keeps moving things around and often with a new upgrade of Finale I'm frustrated for a short while until I get comfortable with the new locations of menu items.
I blamed Sibelius, until I realized it was simply that I didn't take the time to learn the program. The more I use it, the more comfortable I get with it, and I realize that my 12-years of finale-workflow really gets in the way of giving Sibelius a fair chance. I am trying now to approach Sibelius as if it were a brand-new program (which it is) that I have to learn as if I had never used a notation program (that's hard to do!)
I have been unfair in many (but not all) of my former criticisms of Sibelius and have tried to point out the same unfairness in Sibelius users' complaints regarding Finale. If anybody simply gets the program (I agree that both demos, Sibelius and Finale are lousy ways to learn the program, since neither is truly full-functioned and prevent really learning how to use the program, since you can't save a project and continue working on the same thing for a week or more continuously to really get comfortable with the program), does the included tutorials, joins one of these lists and reads the questions and problems raised by others and tries out the solutions themselves, even if they haven't reached the point where they need a particular function, and they will get more comfortable more quickly with the way either program works.
Both programs can and do generate gorgeous notation and both programs can and do generate truly ugly notation. With either program the output is the responsibility of the user.
Both programs are very complex and neither will stand up to a cursory attempt to learn it.
Unfortunately, Sibelius tries to make that "gorgeous output and easy to use right out of the box" claim which leads to frustration in many beginners.
Equally unfortunately, Finale has a known history of a steep learning curve (which has gotten to be far less steep as the years have passed) which it seems unable to shake.
They're both equally complex to learn if a person wants to reach a professional engraving level.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
