On 11/22/2015 6:38 AM, Graeme Gerrard wrote: > I don’t get it. I am sure the new owners and engineers have been working > hard and long on 2014.5. But again, a release has emerged that can’t have > been thoroughly tested or it wouldn’t have seen the light of day! > > The problem must be in the testing cycle. Users, actual users, not novice or > pretend users, seem to only take a few hours or days to turn up problems, > problems that should have been detected in alpha tests and never made it to > beta. > The need to “get something out the door” seems to over-ride pride in > producing something good. I am aware it is a massively complex product, or > set of products. > ..and when there’s no real competition…. > Actually Musescore isn’t anywhere near Finale yet, but there is a drive there > to make a better product that is clearly missing among “professional” > producers. > Graeme >
Actually, with version 2 I think Musescore got a lot closer to Finale than many think, and for many people who use notation software, Musescore is all they will ever need. Not professional engravers, but hobbyist musicians, students, and composers who need good notation but not all the intricacies of Finale or Sibelius (or the expense). While I do some professional engraving projects when the opportunity arises using either Finale or Sibelius if the customer specifies, I find that when left to my own choices and for all the new projects of my own I use Sibelius and get wonderful results without many of the frustrations that recent versions of Finale have introduced. These are the kinds of projects which for years I used Finale for. So I'm not quite sure why you're saying that there is "no real competition" for Finale. Certainly there is with Sibelius, except that its corporate ownership doesn't seem to be any better than Finale's corporate ownership. And some new notation software users are going with Notion, although it's got a ways to go before it will catch up with Sibelius or Finale for more complex notation needs. But at least Notion has a usable tablet version using the same file format which allows users to do a lot while away from their primary computers without the somewhat lossy migration using MusicXML (but at least that's a huge improvement over MIDI migration). That's something that both Sibelius and Finale would do well to emulate! Steinberg's notation product is still far from the marketplace so we have no clue whether it will be significant competition or not -- certainly they are pouring lots of development dollars into it with no publicly visible corporate pressure to rush an incomplete product to market. And their development team is headed by a person with a proven track record of leading solid development of notation software. -- David H. Bailey [email protected] http://www.davidbaileymusicstudio.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: [email protected]
