Ken, thanks.
The last version of Sib I did serious work in was 1.4, so I'm all-too
familiar with many of those frustrations. Some of the fixes I knew
about, and some I didn't, but the nicest thing about Mr. Spreadbury's
comments is that they seem to reflect a genuine change in attitude from
the Sib 1.4 days, where there really did seem to be little interest in
fixing serious deficiencies.
I'll be honest -- I *hated* working with Sib 1.4. It was, in my
opinion, completely unacceptable for serious engraving work, an
incredible chore to use, and horribly buggy to boot. Clearly that's no
longer the case.
Obviously, the Dynamic Parts are the crown jewel of Sib 4, but this
list contains lots of nice, little features that are extremely useful--
(like batch print to PDF (*without* mucking about with FinaleScript,
which most users will never learn to use.)
I have just a few little quibbles with Mr. Spreadbury, who seems like a
decent and forthright guy:
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.
It was grabbing the tie ends that was hard (especially when items
overlapped). Apparently there's now a shortcut to cycle through
overlapping items, which is nice (and which would be nice for Finale).
(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.)
I agree with this -- but between the slowdowns caused by Quartz and the
slowdowns caused by Dynamic Parts, Sib 4 feels a lot more sluggish than
Sib 3. (BTW, OpenGL = graphics-card accelerated drawing. This is
something I have lobbied for in Finale since Sib 3 came out. But I was
never sure if Sib 3 used OpenGL -- it was only a hunch. Nice to have
the hunch confirmed.
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.
Also, they still don't have the control points of Finale's Engraver
Slurs. I can still pick out a Sibelius engraving job just by looking
at the slurs, which are never ideal. Also, adjusting slurs in Sib 4 is
still very slow.
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.
My understanding is Sibelius still does not have any method of
expression entry that is as fast as Finale's context-sensitive
metatools. And as Richard Yates discovered, entering articulations is
still much faster and more flexible using Finale's metatools. (Does
Sibelius have anything to compare with Finale's "drag-enclose notes
while holding metatool key" method to assign an articulation to
multiple notes in multiple staves, all in one step?)
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.
SibMac 4 is indeed much, much better than 1.x, but not as speedy as
Sib3, especially when using dynamic parts. And certain operations are
still very laggy (like moving or editing slurs). Sib's *redraw* (which
is effectively instantaneous using any modern graphics card) is
definitely significantly faster than Fin2k5 on comparable hardware, but
that's supposed to be much improved in Fin2k6. But there's more to
speed than just redraw.
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.
I still wish Sib had proper rules along the left and top edge of the
window, like every other application. Sib's "rulers" are actually just
little lines with measurements attached to them. I don't understand
their reluctance to add actual rulers.
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."
This does seem to be the attitude at Sibelius today, which is excellent
to see. It was not always thus.
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.
Except it *is* a deficiency in Sib's features because the UI for moving
a measure to the system above/below is much better in Finale. (A
single keystroke, vs. a menu item buried three levels deep!)
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.
For Sib 3, it wasn't much of an issue. Sib 3 had great Mac OS X
performance. But Sib 4 really is considerably slower on my system (Mac
mini 1.42 GHz), at least when Dynamic Parts are involved.
Anyway, I'm actually very glad to see Sibelius coming along so well.
Sib 4 is so much better than Sib 1.4 that I scarcely even recognize it
anymore. I think the vigorous Fin-Sib rivalry is ultimately beneficial
for both companies.
- Darcy
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Brooklyn, NY
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