He actually got a bit testy with me when I pointed out that the chord analysis provided by the analysis plugin was faulty. He didn't give me chance to point out that Finale's harmonic analysis is worse. His exact words were, "We have spent far too much time on this to accept groundless criticisms. Do you think we would put out a program with features that don't work?" We all stared at him in amazement. Was he serious? Apparently so.
Some features that looked nice (to me):
Re-pitch. You set the cursor on an entered line, and start pressing MIDI keys. The line changes notes to the entered ones, one by one, skipping rests and intelligently dealing with tied notes. This is many, many more keystrokes in Finale.
Add an octave higher or lower in one click, or any interval, for that matter. Several mouse clicks in Finale.
Scanning music was demonstrated, and it worked amazingly well with his test scan. I mention that it was his test scan, because I suspect it was chosen because it works 99% or better with the program, and that MY scans would drop down to the usual 85% or so success rate. Maybe not, though.
Any item you click is highlighted immediately in the proper tool, kind of like Finale's Selection Tool, but it is on all the time, and you can start editing immediately.
Basic things seem to go very quickly, but anything fussy will take a lot of time, which would make it a good choice for students, bad choice for me. You seem to be stuck with Sibelius' way of doing things in a number of ways, but their way is so easy and immediate! Their equivelant of the Setup Wizard always gives a score that plays back with the right instruments, for example.
But they are really lacking certain advanced features for modern music and jazz, including lacking articulations for scoops, doits, long accents, and falloffs, and all those funny string markings (except for the usual ones, which are there.)
At 11:01 AM -0400 6/07/03, David H. Bailey wrote:
Did he tell you that Sibelius can't playback D.C. and D.S.? Everybody in the Sibelius universe seems particularly quiet on that point!
Christopher BJ Smith wrote:At 12:49 AM -0500 6/07/03, Craig Parmerlee wrote:
At 09:06 AM 6/7/2003 +1000, "Matthew Hindson wrote:
By the way, has Makemusic/Codamusic _ever_ made a profit?
I don't know about "ever" but apparently not recently.
They face a tough confluence of circumstances.
Part of that is a heavy push by Sibelius in the school market. At our school we had a visit by a Sibelius specialist who gave an all-day workshop, which went a long way to getting over the "getting started" blues that so many students have with notation software. I have to say, he was very good, very focused, and very critical of the things that Finale doesn't do as well as Sibelius that are of interest to my students.
We know Finale can do all these things, but when it is a multi-step process in Finale and one click in Sibelius, that makes it more attractive to students. And we all know that the software someone starts on, they are likely to stick with. It worked for me and Macintosh, and me with Cubase on Atari.
If Coda could supply more usable default files to start with, this would ease things in the school market considerably. For example, almost everything in Sibelius plays back out correctly of the box. To set up Finale so that everything plays back in the same way is a week's work. (notably, some things that don't play back correctly in Sibelius are bari sax, tenor sax, and any octave-transposing instrument.) Just getting all my students on Finale to let items show on other layers when using Slash Notation is a major hassle. And chord suffixes, sheesh! In Sibelius, chord symbols can be attached to virtual beats (like in Encore) without needing to be attached to actual measure items. This also is very attractive to students who have struggled with the multi-step process to do this in Finale.
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