Well, I, for one, would like to see a point-by-point response to each
of the items. Maybe somebody could do something like:
David -
I forwarded the list to someone at Sibelius as I had to work all day
today. here's a point-by-point response from the source:
Hi Ken,
Thanks for forwarding this to me. I'm sure I've seen this list
before. It's *incredibly* out of date. If you want to send this response
back to the folks on the Finale mailing list, go ahead.
1. Brackets won't automatically hide when you 'optimise' a double (or
more) staved part.
Fixed in Sibelius 3 (two years ago).
2. System spacing is never even.
This was never true; there was a bug in Sibelius 1.x regarding staff
spacing in extracted parts that would sometimes cause the staves to be
spaced unevenly, but it didn't affect full scores. It was fixed in
Sibelius 2 (four years ago) when we added significant new functionality for
adjusting staves (with shortcuts and visual rulers, etc.), aligning them,
and resetting them, etc.
3. Just try to move an individual measure number....
As far as I remember, this has been possible since Sibelius 1.4 or Sibelius
2 (so for either four or five years).
4. Inability to move ties easily.
There have always been keyboard shortcuts to move the ends of ties, and
with the new Optical ties in Sibelius 4 we've substantially improved their
default appearance, too, and given many new options for positioning them.
5. Poor spacing of Multi Measure rests especially in the same system as
single measures.
Not entirely sure what the complaint is here, but Sibelius 4 has new
controls for automatically making long multirests wider. And, of course,
you can always adjust the length of any multirest if you don't like the way
Sibelius does it.
6. Larger files run slow (Mac G4 867mhz/256mb RAM)
Every version of Sibelius for Mac has given performance increases. The big
leap came in Sibelius 3 (two years ago) when we implemented OpenGL
smoothing, making screen redraw as much as four to five times as fast as in
previous versions, with beautiful anti-aliasing to boot. (Sibelius 4 has
just added Quartz display on Mac, which looks even better than OpenGL, but
which is a little slower -- though faster than QuickDraw used to be back in
the Sibelius 1.x/2.x days.)
7. v1.4 Freezes my computer every time I open it from a start-up...
This sounds like a particular system incompatibility. This does happen
very occasionally, though I don't recall any other similar examples.
8. Impossible to recover text (in undo history) if you've hit return
from a text block edit.
Not sure what's meant here. But you can of course undo the editing of text
objects in the score, and always have been able to.
9. Very frustrating when you need to move individual systems or staves,
they all jump around and the page gradually moves higher in the screen
view until you are stuck with just the lower 4cms of your score in view.
Sibelius 2 improved this with the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to drag
staves around. And of course it has always been possible to change the
default distances between staves numerically. And in Sibelius 4, you can
also prevent Sibelius from ever moving the score automatically on the
screen at all, if you want to.
10. Hairpin cresc./dims. vary in opening width depending on their length.
This is still true, and though you can change the default aperture for
short, medium and long hairpins, we really need to offer the user control
over the aperture of every hairpin individually via our Properties window,
which we will do in a future version of Sibelius.
11. Slurs are not like engraver slurs in Finale, they collide and clash
all over, plus they are really hard to move around over system breaks,
some you can't move at all.
There have been lots of improvements to slurs since Sibelius 1.4, including
their editability via the keyboard, behaviour over system and page breaks,
etc. However, they don't automatically avoid collisions under their arcs
like Finale's Engraver slurs do, and Sibelius could certainly stand some
additional controls for fine adjustment of individual slurs.
12. Terrible look to rhythmic notation, for example try two
consecutive un-beamed 8th notes with a tie.....
Not sure what's meant here, but if it's about ensuring minimum lengths for
ties, etc., this is a new feature of Sibelius's note spacing rules in
Sibelius 4.
13. Printing is slower (spreads and spooling scores).
Printing in Sibelius 4 for Mac is really, really quick -- perhaps as much
as four to five times as quick as in previous versions -- because we've
totally rewritten the print engine to take advantage of Apple's latest
recommended technologies.
14 Clunky text selection for expressions etc.
I assume this is a complaint about our word menu system (where you
right-click during text input for a useful menu of terms to input into the
score). This is actually pretty flexible (e.g. you can create your own
shortcuts both for text styles and for individual text items within those
text styles), and Sibelius, for example, has *always* been able to mix
fonts in text expressions, something which I understand Finale has only
recently been able to do.
15. Procedure for changing (hiding or deleting) measure numbers is far
too complicated.
This is still quite fiddly: you have to create a bar number *change* and
hide that. Certainly this could be improved.
16. Page %'s for viewing are fixed and not always what you want for
optimum screen size, you can't just select a size as with Finale (or
make it default).
Nope, this hasn't been true since (I think) Sibelius 2. And there have
been substantial improvements to zooming and navigation behaviour
(including more in Sibelius 4).
17. Beams and Slurs look really jagged on screen.
Not since Sibelius 3, which introduced full display anti-aliasing on both
Windows and Mac. Sibelius 4 also introduced Quartz display on Mac, which
looks really, really good.
18. Flags don't line up with stems on screen view
I think this was a specific issue with using the PostScript versions of the
Sibelius fonts with ATM on Mac OS 9. Not an issue nowadays.
19. Accidentals in chord clusters are incorrect and often badly spaced.
This was improved in Sibelius 2, but I know some engravers would like us to
adjust Sibelius's automatic behaviour further. (You can of course nudge
accidentals individually if you want to.)
20. Placement of Articulations (accents, staccs, tenutos, etc.) is far
too rigid, there is no scope for individual placement or movement.
This is true. If you add e.g. multiple articulations to the same note,
they can only be moved together, and can only be flipped to the other side
of the note together. We have also had requests from engravers in the US
that we should make it easier to make certain articulations (e.g. up/down
bows) default to outside slurs. At the moment, you have to use symbols to
achieve that. (Though of course if what you're interested in is very
precise notation, you can position symbols anywhere you like, so it's not
the case that Sibelius cannot achieve this.)
21. In part extracts of Multi Wind parts you will loose the
transpositions for each instrument change.
This is certainly not an issue with dynamic parts in Sibelius 4.
22. Any Finale file containing grace notes imported into Sibelius will
really mess up.
There are certainly issues with Sibelius's .mus/.etf file import, though we
document them all (both in the documentation and in a Help Center article
on our web site). Nowadays I'd recommend MusicXML as the format of choice
for transferring data from Finale to Sibelius.
23. Try putting articulations over rhythmic notation.....Yuk!
If the original author of this list means slash noteheads, we've not had
complaints about this from the many jazz and commercial composers,
arrangers and copyists who use the software. But he/she may mean something
else!
24. So you want to move an Articulation? This is what the Sibelius
manual says on page 69:
You can now drag articulations and flip them to the other side of the note.
25. Score expressions (tempo markings etc.) cannot be 'nudged' and must
be dragged.
You have always been able to nudge staff-attached text, symbols, lines,
etc. with the keyboard. Sibelius 3 added the ability to nudge
system-attached items (like tempo markings) with the keyboard.
26. Settings for part extract need to be altered each time for single or
double stave parts.
Definitely no longer true in Sibelius 4.
27. If you change font details on a text expression all other instances
of that word in the score remain unchanged, so you have to change them
all individually.
This was fixed in Sibelius 2 (four years ago).
28. Flags on voice layers are too short and collide.
I assume the poster is referring to the convention of shortening stems on
notes low in the staff when stems are forced downwards by the presence of
another voice. This is a legitimate convention, specified in all the
standard texts, and what Sibelius does by default, but you can of course
adjust this in any number of ways: case-by-case by adjusting individual
stems; by changing the default stem length; by using e.g. straight flags
rather than ornate curved ones. Sibelius is pretty flexible in this regard.
29. The broken chord symbol in front of chord clusters is not taken into
spacing consideration and consequently needs to be dragged around to
stop it clashing with barlines, every time.
This is still true. We need to allow things like arpeggio lines to be
taken into account by the spacing algorithm.
30. Most articulations are not taken into spacing consideration.
You'd have to define "articulations" for me, here. Articulations above and
below the notes certainly *are* accounted for by Sibelius, and those are
the only kinds of articulations you can create automatically in the program.
31. Tenutos collide with ties on notes and you can't move 'em.
They may still occasionally collide, but you can move either the tie or the
tenuto as required on a case-by-case basis.
32. Awful looking ties on an up-stem to a down-stem note, the tie goes
through the stem.
Tie appearance is substantially better in Sibelius 4 than previous
versions. We've asked a number of professional engravers about how they
look and they've told us that they're the best-positioned ties by default
of any notation software they've seen.
33. Impossible to select multiple items like text or staff expressions.
This has never been true: you've always been able to make very flexible
multiple selections in Sibelius. The ease of selecting, copying and
pasting in the program is one of its great strengths.
34. Speed users will find that you are constantly grabbing the wrong
items as the application is so slow to react.
The responsiveness of the program is, in general, much, much better than it
was back in Sibelius 1.x days, especially on Mac OS X, where it's
significantly faster than Finale on comparable hardware.
35. Time delay on editing text and moving staves.
See 34 above.
36. No spacing for chord symbols.
This is still true: the width of chord symbols isn't automatically taken
into account when resetting note spacing. Of course you can adjust the
space manually, but we need to improve this.
37. No on screen guide lines for aligning text or expressions.
This is a bit of a misleading complaint. You can (since Sibelius 3) use
the supplied graph paper texture for alignment, which is very handy, plus
you also have on-screen selection rulers (since Sibelius 2), which show the
distance of objects from the staff to which they're attached, and you have
useful align in a row/column commands (right since Sibelius 1), too.
38. 1st Repeat bars come out too close to key signatures and need to be
dragged to avoid collision.
Fixed in Sibelius 4.
39. Inability to drag an expression anywhere in the area under key
change signatures in double staves like a piano part.
It may be true that you can't drag it there, but it's easy to nudge it
there by adjusting its X and/or Y offset in the Properties window.
40. When editing a text block you dont get WYSIWYG, the last letters
are usually missing.
This was fixed long ago, and has since been improved again on Mac in
Sibelius 4, with support for Apple's Unicode text editing engine, MLTE.
41. Inability to show measure numbers over multi measure rest groups,
for example 24-28.
This is still true. Easy enough to add as text, but Sibelius should have
an automatic feature for this.
42. Default note spacing 'rule' as its so pretentiously called, allows
collision of the flags on a 16th note with the barline if it is the
final note in the measure.
This was fixed with the advent of Optical spacing in Sibelius 3.
43. Page breaks won't stay in place if you adjust the systems
afterwards, for instance if you alter the number of measures in each system.
This is a misunderstanding. If you want to lock the layout of the page,
use Layout > Format > Lock Format, rather than just inserting page and/or
system breaks.
44. Cautionary accidentals before a change of transposing instrument in
multi-wind part is extremely dodgy.
I think this refers to Sibelius's occasional trick of displaying a
redundant key signature when you change the transposition of an instrument
mid-way through the score; this is fixed in Sibelius 4.
45. Alternate notation is not real, it is graphical and therefore you
get no playback and can copy only the symbol to another measure not the
music that it 'hides' as with Finale.
I'm not familiar with the notion of "alternate notation" in Finale, but
Sibelius 2 and later allows you to hide any music you like (and Sibelius 3
allows you to hide entire staves with music on them, via Focus on Staves),
so you can have a visual represntation of the music that doesn't play back
and a hidden one that does.
46. There is no choice to fix the font size selected, so if you reduce
the note size the font size goes with it.
This was added in Sibelius 4.
47. Treble and Bass Clef changes in LH or RH Piano/Keyboard parts get
mysteriously changed upon part extract requiring a reproof.
This was never reported to us as a bug, but in any case we've added extra
options for the handling of clefs in dynamic parts in Sibelius 4.
48. You can't move a 8va--------- extension over system breaks to the
left or right.
Yes you can: there's been an option (since Sibelius 2, I think) for this in
Engraving Rules.
49. Inability to open a selected sequence of .sib files from the finder
in the order you shift click them. They just all appear in A-Z order.
This is useless when you want to print out a set of parts in a specific
order.
This specific thing is, I'm pretty sure, down to the OS rather than
Sibelius. But of course we've now got automatic features for batch
printing of parts, including batch printing to PDF via Mac OS X.
50. Sibelius began life as a University project undertaken by the Finn
brothers and thus it comes over as such; a rather amateurish
application, even the manual has a snooty 'we know better than you do'
air to it. They dont.
People often misunderstand the tone of the manual. I think perhaps people
misinterpret phrases like "should you be struck with the urge to do so" as
"don't do this, because we say you shouldn't, or Sibelius won't let you"
rather than a light-hearted tone of voice.
I can assure you that both Ben and Jonathan themselves trained with
professional engravers in the UK for a while, and throughout the
development of Sibelius have been lucky enough to call upon the services of
some truly world-class engravers to help design the program. That's not to
say that everything you see in the program represents something that these
engravers would be happy with (e.g. we've talked about things like hairpin
apertures, editing slurs and articulations inside/outside slurs in this
list), but Sibelius is still a "work in progress" and we consult carefully
with professional engravers before we implement new notation features.
I can assure you that the attitude at Sibelius is not "we know better than
you," but rather, "let us help you, and if you need something that we can't
do, tell us what it is -- not to justify it to us because we think we know
best, but so we can work out how best to help you."
51. Drum noteheads are poor.
This is a matter of taste, of course. We boldened some of the shaped
noteheads (cross, diamond, etc.) in the Opus fonts at some point (either
Sibelius 2 or Sibelius 3), but this isn't something we get a lot of
complaints about, and you can of course use any music font you like for
these noteheads if you don't like the supplied Opus, Inkpen2 and Helsinki ones.
52. Rehearsal marks (A,B,C, etc.) are not easily moved. If you drag them
too far away from their original position the rehearsal mark jumps up or
down, so letter C becomes D or B and all the others change too. This is
listed in the manual as a feature!
The automatic re-ordering of rehearsal marks *is* a feature, and a useful
one (if you need to add a new rehearsal mark between existing ones in the
score, what a pain if you had to go and change all the subsequent
ones!). However, I believe the real complaint is that they re-attach to
different bars too easily in extracted parts, which is yet another thing
we've improved with dynamic parts in Sibelius 4.
53. Inability to group sets of measures into many systems.
That's not quite true. You can't select 8 bars, say, and say "make into 3
systems", but it's trivially quick to insert breaks and lock their format
to achieve this. I would class this as simply wanting Sibelius to behave
like another program.
54. Inability just to simply nudge measures up or down systems.
This is true; I think I've seen in Finale people selecting a bar and
hitting the up/down arrow to move it to the previous or next system, which
is quite cool. Of course you can achieve exactly the same effect in
Sibelius by selecting the bars you want to have on one system and choosing
Layout > Format > Make Into System, so again, I'd class this not as a
deficiency in Sibelius's features, but rather as a desire to have Sibelius
work like Finale.
55. Lack of spacing in secondary layers and no update of layout.
Lack of spacing in secondary layers? Sibelius has always taken all voices
into account when doing its spacing, so I don't think I quite understand
the complaint. If "no update of layout" refers to there not being an
Update Layout command in Sibelius, then that's quite true, but it's also
not required in Sibelius, because the layout you see on the screen is
always the actual layout of the score. So I'd class this as, again,
wanting Sibelius to act like Finale (and in this case there's absolutely no
need for it to do so).
56. Clunky actions with most dragging movements, sometimes delayed,
sometimes secondary.
I think this is the third or fourth time that performance issues have shown
up on this list. Again, Sibelius 3 in particular represented a big leap in
performance on Mac OS X. I really don't think this is an issue any more.
57. Freemidi doesnt work with Sibelius, even though it is included with
the CD.
FreeMIDI *does* work with Sibelius 1.x, 2.x and 3.x on Mac OS 8/9, but of
course it's no longer supported in Sibelius 4 (which is Mac OS X only).
58. Menus are confusing, too long (submenus), and sometimes
inappropriate. For example: Create Text.
"Confusing" is in the eye of the beholder. I agree that somebody who's
used to Finale's menus may find Sibelius's menus difficult to use to begin
with, but I think this complaint is so subjective that I don't really see
how we could "fix" it. (And what's wrong with the Create > Text menu? The
things you choose from it are text styles for creating text objects in the
score!)
59. Cheap manual, poorly indexed and not logical to follow. Some items
have no reference at all, usually the bits that dont work properly.
The manual gets better and better with each new version of Sibelius (though
I'm biased: I worked on it from Sibelius 1.2 up to Sibelius 3, and have
been involved in the writing and editing of the Sibelius 4 documentation,
too). In particular, we changed the printing and binding method of the
User Guide in Sibelius 2 and also radically improved the indexing and
cross-referencing. In Sibelius 4, we've retained the high-quality printed
manual but also made the full text of the Reference material available
on-screen in Sibelius 4 in a cross-platform HTML help format that can be
searched by keywords, browsed by index, etc.
60. No auto spacing when measures are moved to other systems.
Not true.
61. Sibelius doesnt believe in using handles for any element which is a
great idea until two or more elements overlap and then you cant select
anything.
This is true to an extent, though many objects (e.g. lines, etc.) *do* have
handles. And you can easily change the selected object using Tab/Shift-Tab.
62. Restrictive copy protection especially if you need to use it on more
than one computer.
Finale 2004 introduced a copy protection method that is almost identical to
that of Sibelius 3 and later. Both Finale and Sibelius allow you to
register over the internet, install on two computers, etc. Actually,
Sibelius's scheme is a little less restrictive than Finale's because it
allows you to easily transfer your two copies of Sibelius between machines
without contacting us, via the Unregister Sibelius command that tells our
servers you're unregistering on one machine in order to register on another.
63. Overpriced. Upgrades also expensive and it is impossible to run 2
versions on the same computer.
In the US, educational single-user copies of Sibelius are actually cheaper
than educational single-user copies of Finale, nowadays. And the
professional prices are identical (or were, last time I checked).
It's also by no means impossible to run two versions on the same computer,
though we don't actively encourage this.
64. The Sibelius web site for user problems is monitored in such a way
that you only see the problems and solutions they want you to see.
This isn't true. Anybody is welcome to browse the Help Center on our web
site, including the user web forum, though only registered users of
Sibelius can post messages there.
65. All Sibelius publications have the same look to them, there is very
little scope for customisation and to change the overall style even
though they have a 'house styles' option, which is merely a list of
various notation preferences most of which are very restricted.
I think this is a gross generalisation. Sibelius's house style options
allow a great deal of flexibility over just about every aspect of the score
(line thickness, symbol design, spacing, etc., etc.).
66. Claims for the slick importing of Finale files are way over the top.
The truth is that they bring in little more information than a standard
MIDI file import would do.
Didn't we see this one earlier as number 22? Either way, it's not true,
and MusicXML import is really a heck of a lot better than MIDI.
67. Winged repeats are possible on the starting repeat bars but not the
ending repeat bars!
This was fixed in Sibelius 2.
68: It is impossible to have two brackets of the same type in different
horizontal positions, as for example when a divided string section uses
extra staves.
This is still fiddly to do, and we should have better automatic support for it.
69. Difficulty in getting ending repeat brackets to display on multiple
systems. This is a nightmare, for starters, the height of the ending
bracket is not adjustable when it spans multiple systems. You have to
position it exactly right when you click it in, because once it's there,
it ain't moving.
This is certainly not true any longer, and I don't think it was even really
true in Sibelius 1.4 either.
So for those of you at home keeping score, you could slice this up a number
of ways. There are 69 things on this list, but four of them are duplicates
of other things on the list, so it's really 65.
Of those 65, by my count, 21 of them were never true to start with (or
represented misunderstandings of the way Sibelius works compared with
Finale), 8 are still true, and 36 have been fixed in the nearly five years
since this list must have been made (if it referred to Sibelius 1.4).
Hope this helps!
All the best,
Daniel Spreadbury
Product Manager
--
Sibelius Software Ltd, 20-22 City North, Fonthill Road, London N4 3HF
Tel: +44 (0)20 7561 7999
Fax: +44 (0)20 7561 7888
Web: http://www.sibelius.com
London and San Francisco
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