At 1:02 PM 06/09/03, David H. Bailey wrote: >And they don't come up with a list of reasons not to buy finale, because >by and large there don't seem to be many people who are primarily >computer-engravers, but more composers who aren't interested in the >minutiae of page layout and item alignment the way we on the Finale list >are.
Friends and colleagues, when they find out I do professional engraving, frequently ask me for an opinion about what is the "best" engraving software. My standard answer has been to say that people who take an interest in what the page looks like prefer Finale, because there are too many things that you can't easily do in Sibelius, whereas people who don't want to think about notation and just want to type in something without much thought and have it come out looking reasonably good prefer Sibelius. The comments on this thread lead me to believe that this answer is still good. (As it turns out, more of my colleagues are in the second category....) One composer whom I used to collaborate with used Sibelius and liked it, but as he was constantly rewriting and changing his Sibelius file throughout the composition process, the end result was frequently a convoluted mess. (He especially liked to change time signatures and barlines, which seemed to be particularly problematic.) I don't know if this was a weakness in the software or if he just didn't know the best way to use it, but it wasn't pretty. He would often end up with extra garbage measures which he just crossed out on the page because he couldn't get rid of them in the file. Our standard procedure was that he would give me a printed copy of the Sibelius file, and explain what some of the weird stuff was really supposed to sound like, and I would retype the whole thing from scratch in Finale just as if it were handwritten copy. (Indeed, in terms of overall structure, it was a lot like a handwritten copy, but with very neat penmanship.) He would occasionally say "Gee, too bad there isn't a way to convert my Sibelius file directly into Finale." I never quite got around to explaining to him that even if there were, I'd still want to start over from scratch. I thought it was a good process. He was happy, because he had a useful tool for printing drafts as he experimented, and then when it was time to make a final copy he hired me to do the professional engraving using the tool I preferred. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
