Thanks for your reply. Since you say you never used Sibelius in OS 9, I'm guessing you jumped on board with Sib 2.0? I just wanted to point out the items that you claim as "not true" were all very real deficiencies back in Sib 1.4. (And I could probably have named at least another 69 more... ) For the record, Jonathan was quite up front about the fact that his list was out of date. I do appreciate your exhaustive run through the list, and it's good to know that most of these problems with Sib -- some of them extremely frustrating -- have since been resolved. (I can't believe that they *still* don't let you move articulations horizontally, but whatever... )
However, since you seem unfamiliar with earlier versions of the program, I just wanted assure you that Jonathan was not making this stuff up. If some of us on this list seem a little bit bitter about Sibelius, it is because when they burst on the scene, they made extravagant claims about the superiority of their software -- claims that turned out to be completely untrue. The "we know better than you" attitude Jonathan describes is very real -- check out the manual for Sib 1.4 sometime, it is filled with passages like, "In the highly unlikely event that you want to do X, here is this baroque, buggy workaround" when X would turn out be something you'd want to do every day. More than any deficiencies in what was, after all, a young program compared to Finale, it was that arrogant, know-it-all, "why-would-you-want-to-do-THAT?" attitude (which came directly from the Finn brothers themselves that soured a lot of people to the program. (Well, that and the program's inability to do basic stuff like adjust the height of repeat brackets independently over multiple systems, or adjust ties and/or slurs that span system breaks, or assign fingering numbers without going four levels deep into contextual submenus, or... )
As for performance issues, I don't know if this is still the case, back in Sib 1.4 and Sib 2.0, Macintosh performance was absolutely abysmal compared to the PC version. Also, if you've only used Finale either in Classic or in the current, dreadfully slow first-gen native OS X version, that's not really a fair basis for comparison. Finale screams in OS 9, and the Mac version is just as responsive as the PC version, on equivalent hardware. I will be the first to admit that FinMac 2004 is painfully slow, but I have every expectation that the situation will improve once Coda gets the kinks worked out. (And at least Finale has scroll view, which is a huge boost when doing note entry.) On the other hand Sibelius has always been borderline unusable on my machine (550 Mhz G4). In OS 9, it's bad, and in OS X is much, much worse. Perhaps Sibelius 3 is better -- I'll check out the demo one of these days.
I admit that now that I'm no longer required to use Sibelius for work reasons, I haven't kept up with the changes to the program. I did fool around with the demo of Sibelius 2.0 and on cursory examination, I'd say it addressed about 25% of my major issues with the program. I haven't checked out Sibelius 3 yet, but from your list it seems like they've maybe addressed another 15-20%, which is terrific. I'm glad to see Sibelius getting better because it keeps Coda on their toes -- Finale's user-friendliness started improving dramatically as soon as Sibelius hit the market.
- Darcy
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn NY
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