At 1:36 PM -0400 10/29/09, Craig Parmerlee wrote:
Slightly off this topic, does Sibelius have anything comparable to Finale's managed parts? That feature of Finale is unbelievably powerful. It elegantly solves one of the biggest time wasters: managing separate files for extracted parts. This relates to the selection tool because you can use the tool to make changes in the score view and they are automatically reflected in the individual parts. And you can also use the same tools within the parts directly to make changes that are maintained separately from the score.
Yes, although it's a bit different. In fact I think Sibelius implemented it earlier, but I might be wrong. On the other hand, Mosaic had it 'way back in '92 or '93, and I've never understood why it took both of the other programs 15 years to catch up! Today's versions are much more sophisticated and flexible, of course.
While there might be little opportunities for improvement here and there, I think Finale has really hit the ball out of the part in this area. I cannot conceive of working without this feature. To me that is very similar to the scroll view. Did Sibelius ever implement scroll view? They seemed to be in denial on that for about 5 releases, and that feature is really transformational.
Yes, Panorama, which I believe was new in Sibelius 5. Finale may have been first with this. It can be useful, but I don't actually use it a lot. I'm not sure "denial" is valid (although I've heard that it did apply to the original developers). Each program has its own set of priorities, but one company seems to set them for the benefit of its customers and the other for the benefit of its marketing strategy.
The competition seems to be very healthy, and good for all of us who use either or both programs. And if you can live without the more recent bells and whistles, my son still uses Sibelius 2, which he got when he was a Sib Demonstrator in college. And all previous versions back to Sib2 can be opened in any more recent version, and re-saved in that version for sharing files. The so-called insurmountable difficulties in implementing this don't seem to have bothered the Sib developers.
John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[email protected]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
