On Saturday, June 7, 2003, at 01:40 PM, Christopher BJ Smith wrote:
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.
Holy shit. This guy should go work for the current administration. He would make an excellent replacement for Ari Fleisher.
I admire your restraint. I would have ripped him a new one -- starting with the devastating "guitar frame crash" bug from 1.4 (clicking on the first fret of a guitar frame would cause the *entire operating system* to crash). [This was on NT4, don't know if the Mac version was similarly afflicted.] Or did they "not put far too much time" into versions prior to 2.0? Give me break, already.
Sibelius's manual, BTW, drips with condescension on every page, so it's not surprising to me that their reps are such assholes.
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.
Those are good, once you get used to them. However, I found that Sibelius was not nearly as friendly towards "blind" entry as Finale -- in Finale, I can basically keep my eye on the score and blaze away doing note entry without ever looking up. In Sibelius, I could never quite do this, despite months and months of practice -- it required more visual checks to make sure that (for instance) the screen was keeping up with the input and no notes had been dropped.
Also, my number-one problem when I was learning how to use Sibelius was the lack of an insertion point. When a note is highlighted, it could mean one of two things:
1) I am ready for you to input new notes, and when you play something on the MIDI keyboard it will be added *after* this note;
or
2) You have selected this note, and when you play something on the MIDI keyboard it will *replace* this note.
There is *no* visible difference between these two states. The user is simply expected to remember what state he's in.
Other people who had never used music notation software before seemed to have no problem with this behavior, but for those of us familiar with Finale, it was infuriating.
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.
Oh, no, obviously the test scan has been, well, tested. To scan. Well. I was told scanning with Sibelius worked really well, all things considered, but we never actually used it at work. Obviously, it didn't work *so* well that it was faster than entering Hal Leonard sheet music (pop tunes, mostly) by hand, or converting from the Score files.
(The Score converter was, BTW, an enormous pain, but I suppose marginally better than doing it from scratch. The files needed a *lot* of correcting, though. I wouldn't want to do it that way on complex music -- luckily the stuff we were doing was pretty simple.)
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.
Unless two elements are really close to one another, or overlapping and you can't get Sibelius to highlight the right one. (This is obviously a problem with the selection tool, too.) Ties on chords were the worst for this -- you had to zoom in to 400-800% in order to grab the tie you wanted to move.
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.
I actually don't think it's that great a choice for jazz students if they want to do anything more complicated than a lead sheet. (At least, it wasn't back in 1.4.) Part extraction in Sibelius is very, very, very bad, and I really wouldn't want to tackle a jazz orchestra chart unless things have substantially improved since then.
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.
Finale's doesn't? I don't know about these things, because I just have everything set to play back on the Rhodes piano patch on my keyboard (which has a little more body and sustain than the acoustic piano patch). I think I would probably do this even if I had an expensive sound module.
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.)
Doesn't Sibelius support custom alternate fonts yet? Couldn't you use JazzFont instead of "Ink" (or whatever their faux-manuscript font is called)?
- Darcy
----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Boston MA
No one likes us I don't know why We may not be perfect But heaven knows we try But all around, even our old friends put us down Let's drop the Big One and see what happens
- Randy Newman, "Political Science"
_______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
