Sibelius does have some clever defaults, such as making trills and crescendos play back. But it has some serious limitations when compared to Finale in regards to MIDI. For people doing serious MIDI work who need to produce a professional sounding result, Finale IS superior to Sibelius... no question. Sibelius has absolutely no equivalent to the MIDI Tool for doing fast editing work. If I want to make a string run sound realistic by extending the note durations of each note, the closest I can come quickly is to put a slur over the music. Of course, I can't have separate playback definitions for my slurs, so if I do this, ALL of my slurs will make notes playback at 120% duration. Its MIDI messages are also hampered (you CAN'T change channels... try switching to a pitched percussion instrument on a non-pitched staff...).
I actually like the fact that Finale doesn't have default playback settings for Acro and Pizz. I don't use general MIDI instruments, and having the music switch patches automatically really screws things up. Sibelius does make up for this in their included instrument libraries, but if they don't have an instrument library for your instrument, you can't create one.
You CAN add words to the playback dictionary and change their playback effect. But these can only control a very limited number of MIDI events, nothing like Finale's expressions. For example, I need to enter Mod wheel changes in order to select patches with GigaStudio. In Sibelius I have to type ~c,1,101. This is not fast, and it isn't intuitive. When it comes to MIDI, the initial control is intuitive, but if you go even a little deep into it, Finale is easier to figure out as well as faster. Also, you can't make a case for the input of basic things like pizz. being as fast as Finale. More intuitive? Yes. But it comes at a price... speed.
I think that having a better interface for making lines playback (slurs, hairpins, trills, etc.) would be a good thing for Finale, provided it can be easily turned off and fully controlled. But beyond that, I believe Finale's implementation is better.
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