John Howell wrote:
At 8:18 AM -0800 7/5/07, Eric Dannewitz wrote:
http://www.soundonsound.com/ has a whole page about Sibelius 5. I have
YET to see them mention Finale 2008.
dhbailey wrote:
There was a short blurb in PCWorld (at least the on-line edition)
about the release of Sibelius 5, which starts off by calling Sibelius
the world's best selling notation software.
I didn't catch this when I read David's original post, but look
carefully at the wording. It does not say the "world's best software,"
but the "world's best selling software." Big difference. Does anyone
happen to have the figures to back that up or refute it?
No figures cited, just the brag. Of course, Finale makes the same claim,
so who's to know where the truth lies?
And while there is a big difference in the meaning of the statements,
the results for newbies is often the same: They buy the best, whether
it's just best-selling or is truly recognized as the best product. Take
the iPod -- it's not the world's best mp3 player, but it certainly is
one that many people love to buy. Create the hype and it doesn't matter
what the quality is -- McDonald-ization is a fact of economic survival
in the marketplace. Demand is more important than quality.
I'm not sure whether MM is making any attempt to be friendly to the
education market, but I do know that when our department was forced to
switch from Finale to Sibelius because MM completely ignored the needs
of Mac OS X customers, that represented a switch of perhaps 40-50 sales
per year, every year from now on, plus site licenses for faculty
members, just because of poor planning. And our students are actually
USING Sibelius, rather than swearing at Finale.
MakeMusic is attempting to be friendly to the educational marketplace.
I just think they have lost the ability to succeed at being friendly to it.
Why Sibelius wins so many school site-license contracts and Finale
doesn't is something that MakeMusic needs to address. It's not
impossible, it just seems that MakeMusic has no clue what it should be
doing. It's too caught up in the SmartMusic Accompaniment System to
focus the resources it needs to on the Finale marketplace.
For the vast majority of the notation software marketplace, which is
definitely NOT professional engravers, very few people venture far
beyond the defaults, nor do they reach into the really tricky aspects of
notation. And for those people, Sibelius right out of the box is
definitely a better product than Finale right out of the box. For
college students writing harmony exercises or orchestrating 4-part
chorales or putting down themes for a composition course, the ability to
reset the staff thicknesses or move a single note's dot .1mm
left/right/up/down is simply not important. And for the folks writing
traditional band/orchestra works using traditional harmonic structures,
they don't care one bit about cross-staff notation.
As a player, I was sightreading July 4th music yesterday, and found it
much easier to read parts done using Sibelius' default settings than to
read parts done in Finale, and often shrunk too much to fit the page
just because it's so easy to do so. I was actually surprised to find
this true, since I hadn't expected it.
Sibelius does produce a great looking page with default settings.
Comparing it to someone's altered Finale page, however, isn't really a
fair comparison, because someone could just as easily have done the same
in Sibelius. That they didn't feel they needed to says more than the
actual comparison between the two different outputs.
This is where Finale needs to work harder -- the program should be able
to be installed, a file begun and worked on to conclusion and printed
out with no adjustment to the defaults and it should look as elegant as
a Sibelius file worked on the same way. And there's reason that Finale
can't do it, other than the fact that nobody at MakeMusic has sat down
and designed a maestro-default.ftm file which emulates in every detail
what Sibelius' default file does.
There's no way that a work created in Finale using the default template
and with no percentage reduction either on staves or systems or whole
pages looks anything other than amateurish. They need to address that.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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