I like the new feature, but if I were doing a large ensemble working with
continuously changing scoring patterns, I believe that the staff list
provides the more intuitive working method. If the expressions method is
critical to publishers, then publishers should be insisting that their
composers use that method; for the rest of us, MakeMusic really ought to
make the case for the reduction in this feature, and be explicit about it:
are they deprecating it via the reduction in capacity, or is it in fact
technically impossible in 2009 to have a larger (or, ideally, unlimited)
number of staff lists.
In general, having used Sibelius in parallel now for a year (in addition
to several other programs), the advantage of Finale is its flexibility.
When something is possible in Sibelius there is generally one way to do
it, while in Finale, there are often many solutions, each offering
distinct advantages to the user, whether in terms of work flow, intuitive
quality, flexibility, or just taste. It would be great if Finale stuck to
this advantage and even increased its versatility: one small pet example
of mine, when displaying a time signature other than the actual time
signature (an important feature in Finale) would be to allow any number in
the denominator, not just powers-of-two. This is a small feature that
would be simple to implement -- the time signature displayed being
fictional anyways -- but be very useful to at least a small group of us.
Daniel Wolf
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