On 11 Oct 2007 at 10:47, Brian Appleby wrote: > Bottom line is, Finale 2006 does pretty well everything I require.
I've refrained until now from replying because: 1. I'm no a professional copyist. 2. I use Finale pretty occasionally, though I have lots of work invested in it. 3. I never upgraded very often. But the above comment by Brian Appleby prompted me to think about comparing MakeMusic's situation to that of Microsoft Office. The chief competitor for each new version of MS Office is the installed base of previous versions of MS Office. I still primarily use Office 97 (as do many of my clients), because I find the later versions intrusive and with very few exceptions, they offer very little that I need. In regard to Finale, I started using it in 1991, with Finale 2.01 running on Windows 3.1 (it was problematic, as it was designed for Windows 3.0, which lacked TrueType fonts; the printing was not great, because I didn't have a PostScript printer and so got the screen fonts; but it was good enough for my purposes at the time). I upgraded to Finale 3.52 and then 97 and last upgraded to Finale 2003, which basically meets my needs. Yes, there are a ton of new features that would be useful, but given that I have so much investment in the earlier versions, and less so in doing new work, it wouldn't be that helpful. Yes, I'd like to the have the new auto-placement for expressions. Yes, I'd love to have Human Playback, GPO and the ability to save directly to audio. Yes, I'd love to have linked parts. Yes, I'd love to have the new selection tool. But none of these things are really worth that much to me because my usage is so occasional. My last project was creating parts for my viol consort for our music for our upcoming concerts. I didn't really need even *one* of these features (though linked parts would have been helpful for the current set of edits, where I'm putting the vocal text into the viol parts; I'm doing it only in the extracted parts for now, as I don't want to completely regenerate them after putting the texts into the scores), and it didn't take me much time to do any of the work. I have never understood the yearly upgrade cycle -- it just made no sense for me, at least, and I always felt that continually buying the upgrades even when they weren't too significant just rewarded MM's bad behavior in not working harder to make the upgrades more worthwhile. I have tried Sibelius, first starting with Sib 3 and then 4, but have not tried Sib 5. The linked parts were impressive, but as a dyed-in- the-wool Speedy user, I just can't get used to it (way too much mousing, and the little keypad thingy shortcuts just don't work well on a laptop, for instance). Their introduction of scroll view would go a long way to making it more usable for me, as the page orientation always drove me completely crazy, but I don't know how long it would take me to adjust to the basic entry/editing methods. On the other hand, because of Daniel Spreadbury, I have an excellent impression of Sibelius as a company. Back when Sibelius came out with linked parts, we on the Finale list discussed it at great length, and Spreadbury monitored our discussion. Indeed, he initiated a hefty correspondence with me about many of the things about Sibelius that bothered me. What I liked about him was that he was very reasonable in admitting the things that Finale did better than Sibelius, but didn't gloat over the things that Sibelius did better than Finale. He was not a Sibelius zealot at all, just someone trying to make his company's software better. I'm not likely to move to Sibelius unless I have some new projects. But I was always critical of Finale and the basic architecture behind it (I always found its implementation of templates to be disastrous from the beginning, though that's finally been somewhat ameliorated with 2008), and somewhat regretted having adopted Finale instead of learning Score way back when. Now Finale looks like the better choice, but until the late 90s, Score was still the better notation software from my point of view. Had Score had better sound output, I probably would have jumped ship in the mid-90s, before I did the major part of my work in Finale. MakeMusic/Coda never made a lot of money from me, and I was never a big promoter of Finale, as I was all too conscious of its flaws, and never completely satisfied with it. But because of all that, I'm much less likely, I think, to jump ship to Sibelius, as my needs are basically filled by Finale. If my finances continue to be stable and I get a new PC (one of the issues that's kept me from upgrading to the GPO-including versions of Finale), I'll likely give the next version of Finale a serious look. I'm concerned about the bugs, but there are so many things that would benefit me from the last 5 or 6 years of upgrades to the program that it will probably be worth it -- much moreso than would be switching to Sibelius at this point. Then again, I haven't experienced the recent bugs firsthand. The enharmonic bugs would drive me crazy (I have a hard enough time proofing to fix enharmonic mistakes from Speedy entry spelling charts!), but I'm not sure the lyrics bugs would bother me as much (though I do use lyrics rather more than I once did, I still don't use them that much, and I'm just not as picky about things as the pro engravers on the list). So, I'm not someone who will make much difference to MakeMusic at all. And I wonder how many such users there are out there. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
