I think I was unclear about the Keypad in Sibelius. Most of the time
(laptop on the go excluded) I use the 10 key pad on the keyboard.
Clicking on the "toolbar" on the screen is slower. The features I like
to have close at hand are almost all on the top tab on the keypad (or in
the right click context menu). Others working differently or with
different musical requirements might have a different experience. In
general, Sibelius works better with more keyboard and less mousing and
has extensive keyboard shortcuts.
I find Finale's many toolbars, icons, sub-menus, and pop-ups more
frustrating. But that's just me and the way I like to work.
Interesting that you mention the difficulty with "decomposing" combined
parts. I had to do a job recently that involved making keyboard
reductions from some string quartet pieces. This was a Finale job.
Finale would not let me reassign the layer (or voice) of individual
notes so that dissimilar rhythms could live happily in the same bar.
Only the entire measure could be reassigned. Posts to this list and MMs
tech support confirmed that Finale was unable to do what was needed.
Sibelius would easily do it but the customer had to have Finale. Much of
the job had to be re-input from scratch.
I agree with David Baily. While some of us work frequently with both
programs, most everyone has a (strong) preference. I think that's
because one of the two comes closer to the way we think about music. I'm
glad both are so mature and capable.
Richard Smith
www.rgsmithmusic.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
David W. Fenton wrote:
On 13 Aug 2006 at 8:25, dhbailey wrote:
Curiously though, there are also some heavy-hitter Sibelius users
(admittedly not many) who don't like it either and who use Sibelius'
wonderful key-mapping feature to map most of their most commonly used
keypad commands to qwerty-keyboard commands. The biggest of these
(and maybe some others) came to the current Sibelius versions from the
old Acorn computers, which apparently had a different interface.
Even though I'm a keyboard person, I don't find keyboard shortcuts in
visual programs like Finale to be terribly helpful.
My problem with the keypad UI is that the freedom in the visual
interface has been sacrified to the limits of the keyboard. Of
course, perhaps it's because I think of the onscreen keypad as a
toolbar, and I'm frustrated that too many of the things on the
"toolbar" are in hard-to-reach locations (I keep all my main Finale
toolbars active at all times).
Secondly, it's modal, which means the same location onscreen has
different meaning for each tab. This can be OK, but in this case, it
just gets in the way of my being able to remember what's what.
The one thing that I really liked about the Sibelius UI was the note
selection, where you could ctrl-click individual notes to add them to
a selection and then use the keypad to apply multiple things to the
group of notes at once. This non-contiguous selection is something
I'd *really* like to see in Finale. It would make the decomposition
of combined parts much easier, for instance.
begin:vcard
fn:Richard Smith
n:Smith;Richard
email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
url:http://www.rgsmithmusic.com
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