Sibelius have released Sibelius 3, with a demo that can be downloaded. I am not an experienced Sibelius user, but I decided to try it out for a couple of hours. Of course, being inexperienced may mean that some of the observations I have made may be erroneous.
FWIW, here are my impressions, in no particular order: Firstly, apparently Sibelius have decided to ditch the loathed transfer in/out system of registration. You're allowed to have the application installed on two computers now, as long as they're not being used simultaneously. Thank heavens for that. Slurs: they still collide with notes. For example, I entered three crotchets in a treble clef staff, B on the middle line, B an octave above, B on the middle line. The slur went right through the middle stem. What's up with that?!? It's also difficult at times to pick slurs if there are other things in the same region. Unlike Finale's selection tool, which rotates through overlapping items, Sibelius doesn't seem to do this. Also, the lack of handles on lines (as compared to what we're given in Finale) can be maddening as they're difficult to pick up, and it's difficult to work out what does what. There are still no mixed time signatures possible, e.g. 3/4+3/8. There is still no scroll view. You realise how good it is to be able to enter notes without page layout constantly taking place when, for example, the bar you're working on suddenly jumps off the screen because it's been pushed to the next system. Extracting parts is extremely quick in Sibelius. The general layout of the page layout options is also excellent, very easy to understand without looking cramped and overwhelming, as can be the case in Finale. There are heaps of plugins now included in Sibelius. Some of these are pretty cool, such as the metronome marking plugin which lets you tap in a tempo, and it will give you what you tapped, together with the nearest standard metronome marking, allowing you to make your choice. Another cool one is the Check Pizz. plugin, which goes through looking for extraneous markings. There are also some familiar plugins to Finale users such as harp pedalling. There is still not the overall range of plugins available to Sibelius as compared to the third-party Finale ones that are available. The dumb thing about Sibelius plugins is that they're not undoable. You're given an message about this, and advised to save your file before applying them. But really, it's just ridiculous that they can't be undone. The use of measurements displayed on the screen is again excellently implemented in Sibelius. This is a really good feature that would be of great use to many engravers. There is an Auto Page Break feature now in Sibelius that can be used for automatic page turns. This generally works very well and updates on the fly if you move some of the staves around or change the overall staff size. It automatically adds v.s. markings where appropriate. Sometimes it doesn't seem to be so intelligent, and it doesn't seem to be as powerful as Tobias' plugin in Finale 2004. However, on the whole it's very impressive, especially working in conjunction with the automatically respacing systems. The Document Setup in Sibelius is excellent - very well designed and quite simple yet powerful. You're given a preview of the how the document looks if you change, for example, the staff size. Fantastic. In terms of graphics, you can still only import TIFF files into Sibelius documents. Thankfully now you can export TIFF files as well as .EPS files, unlike version 2.0. I couldn't work out if there is any way to constrict dragging to vertical and/or horizontal, a la the use of the Shift key in Finale. This was disappointing. One area in which Finale seems to have it all over Sibelius (from my brief flirtations) is in the area of contextual menus. You can customize contextual menus in Sibelius but they seem to lack the depth of Finale. For example, I entered a line in Sibelius and in mucking around with it (trying to grab it correctly), managed to move it away from being horizontal. There was no contextual menu "Make horizontal" or the equivalent in Finale. While Finale's contextual menus could still do with some expansion IMHO, they seem to be a much more powerful way to do things as compared to Sibelius. Speaking of lines, there is an amazing array of lines built-in to Sibelius. It would be good for Finale to include a much greater array than what currently ship with the default documents. It immediately gives the impression of greater facility. In fact, Sibelius does have greater facility, including markings such as bracketed hairpins and dotted slurs, the definition of which can be edited. Working without a MIDI keyboard, I can see where the Finale 2004 simple entry method has come from (i.e. Sibelius). I some things a bit puzzling in Sibelius, e.g. the bars always being filled with rests after entering a single note, and not being able to turn this off, but no doubt that's a result of my inexperience. The Create Highlight feature is excellent in Sibelius. I could imagine this being tremendously useful in educational scenarios. The House Style features is still fantastic in Sibelius. They're very well presented, and very well thought out. As is the Symbol feature, in which musical symbols are laid out in intelligent groupings for ease of access. It's worth downloading and installing Sibelius for these musical symbols alone (i.e. using them within Finale). In general, to me the best thing about Sibelius is its sense of design and layout in its dialog boxes and menus. They seem to have hit on the head which options the majority of people are going to want. I suspect that's where Sibelius' ease of use factor comes in. Personally, I found the note entry method anything but easy to use, but other things such as dragging staves are immensely easy. It's still probably the case that if you're interested in things happening automatically and generally very quickly, Sibelius is worth a look. I hope that Coda/Makemusic continues along the merry path of cross-pollenation and implements some of Sibelius' impressive features. Matthew -- Matthew Hindson http://hindson.com.au note new email address: add .au to end of old one * Very strong spam-blocker in place * If you have troubles, resend to [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
