On Oct 3, 2006, at 11:20 AM, Bob Shuster wrote:
One other consideration is that I'd *really* like to use the Golden Age font - however I am confidant that I can modify it for use in either application.
Golden Age should work fine in Finale, either platform, though you would have to have the font installed on both Mac and PC machines to see what you are doing, obviously. I don't know what is involved with third-party fonts in Sibelius.
*SO*, what's the advice? Do I stick with Finale or do the Sibelius crossgrade? What I have seen of the new Finale - it looks pretty much the same as Finale 98, except with Aqua-looking buttons and a lot of consumer-level features added that I'll never use.
There are a whole bunch of great new features in Finale since 98, like auto-positioning expressions, new Smart Shapes, mixing fonts in expressions, plus the Mass Edit tool is completely revamped in a much more useable way. If you don't need playback features, you can safely ignore them. Simple Entry is greatly revamped, too, making it a usable choice now. It is not at all the same program as before, despite the similar look.
I presume most of the readers of this list to be ardent Finale users, but I'm sure you've at least looked at Sibelius, so I'd love to hear your opinions on this (without starting a turf war of course.) The issue has probably already been beaten to death, so if you'd rather point me to an archive of such a discussion that would be welcome as well.
Generally, Finale can do more than Sibelius, but with more keystrokes necessary in some operations. If you like customising your look (and it sounds like you do) then I would suggest Finale, as you already know it pretty well and the learning curve would not be too bad. If you like being able to work fast without having to look at the manual, Sibelius is great right out of the box.
Finale and Sibelius are both pretty much the same cross-platform, so that would not be much of a deciding point. Maybe Finale is a bit zippier on Windows than Mac right now, though that may not be true on Intel Macs (I haven't tried.)
Christopher _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
