Lawrence David Eden wrote:
The boys from Sibelius ran a marketing demo for the General Music
teachers in the public schools. I teach Instrumental Music at 4
elementary schools and did not see the demo, but EVERY general music
teacher I run into can't stop talking bout how cool Sibelius is.
During my 30+ years of public school teaching, I have seen this kind of
thing before. Commodore used to dominate the educational profession in
my schools. They lost out to Apple, who in turn, lost out to Dell. In
each case, the newcomer was better at marketing and more interested in
cornering the market.
Now I am seeing Sibelius stick it to Finale. I have not used Sibelius,
nor do I intend to, but I am concerned to see MakeMusic take a back seat
to any other notation software. On this list, I hear mostly complaints
about Finale. Why is MakeMusic willing to take this kind of beating?
For my purposes, (small ensembles), Finale is just fine and I have no
complaints. It used to be that I could endorse Finale without
reservation. Now, I am not so sure. Is Sibelius as good as it appears
to be?
You'll never find 100% agreement with any such statement, but I have
been working very intensively with Sibelius on a project which is just
about complete, and I can say that it sure is easier to work with than
recent versions of Finale.
But I would balance that statement with "for my purposes and for the
projects on which I have used it."
My recent discovery that ctrl-3 no longer initiates a triplet in speedy
entry sure added another nail to the Finale coffin for me.
But I also would not encourage anybody to make a switch to Sibelius on
my say-so -- it's not for everybody. But the tenor of the threads on
the two lists (this Finale list and the yahoogroups Sibelius list) are
very different. On the Sibelius list these days it's like my early days
on the Finale list -- everybody helping everybody else with very few
complaints about the program itself. And interestingly enough, when I
first joined the Sibelius list, it was like the Finale list is these
days, many people complaining about what the program couldn't do or how
it was hard to get it to do what it could do. But all that is reversed
these days, so that this Finale list is mostly complaints and the
Sibelius list is mostly encouragement and assistance.
I really like working with Sibelius and was able to adapt to using midi
keyboard for pitch and the numpad keys to specify duration much more
quickly than I had imagined I would be able to.
If Finale works for you, there's no need (yet) to consider changing.
But with the Finale reports of removing the Speedy Entry tool while
moving it's various elements to other tools, I see a dim and fading
future for Finale. New users may have a great time with Simple Entry,
but I find that it takes just a bit longer to get the same results in
Simple Entry than in Sibelius' entry mode.
MakeMusic is willing to take this beating because they have set their
sights on SmartMusic Accompaniment Software as their saving product
which is where the bulk of their development money seems to be going
(lack of promised levels of new smartmusic accompaniment files
notwithstanding) and they are viewing Finale as a necessary evil to
generate yearly upgrade fees to keep the company afloat. They can't
even keep their two main products (Finale and Smartmusic) at the same
level, according to complaints on this list, so that
Finale2008-generated SmartMusic accompaniment files can't work with the
existing Smartmusic software. Someone didn't think that through very
carefully.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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