Sibelius 5 has been announced, and final barrier to many Finale users
has fallen. They now have their version of scroll-view, called Panorama.
For many of us, that has been a major sticking point in converting our
workflow to Sibelius, and with this new release, scheduled to ship at
the end of this month, there may be a new mass-exodus from Finale to
Sibelius.
There are other enhancements, including Kontakt2 with a whole new bank
of sounds which has been built from several soundbanks including GPO, so
that there will apparently be a more complete instrument list than
GPO-Finale has, included in the program. For the past year,
GPO-Sibelius was an extra-cost add-on. There are advanced page layout
capabilities, and a lot more, including a sort of sketchpad capability
where you can sketch out a motif or a harmony or something and call it
up for copy/paste. No need to resort to additional files for the ideas
while working on a score. The list of new features is at the sibelius
web-site, and I hope that the MakeMusic management is visiting there
right now and seeing how a notation company ought to take its users more
seriously.
I'm not advocating anybody jump ship from Finale to Sibelius, but I
wanted people on this list to know about the new features, which make
Sibelius an even stronger competitor against Finale.
My son has used Finale at home and Sibelius at school (admittedly only
version 3) and he vastly prefers Sibelius. He's heading off to college
in the fall as a music-ed major, so he'll be buying Sibelius to use
there, and you can bet that he will be touting it to fellow music majors
who might not be as computer literate as he is and also to the students
he will eventually teach when he graduates. (where did I go wrong? --
actually I didn't, Finale did.)
Sibelius has had linked score/parts since version 4, and they have some
of the same problems that Finale's version has, but there has been a lot
less complaining on the Sibelius list than on the Finale list here.
AND, one of the biggest points in Sibelius' favor that MakeMusic must
finally address -- version 4 introduced the capability to save current
version files in earlier formats, and that is continuing with version 5.
So there is no need for people to be forced to upgrade, and they can
still share files and edit things and send them back. Admittedly a Sib4
file, with linked score/parts, if saved as version3 will lose the linked
score/parts capability, but at least it can be shared without the need
for add-on utilities or forced upgrades.
If MakeMusic doesn't do something fast (such as addressing long-standing
bugs, taking users' requests for "save as earlier version" capabilities,
and actually appearing to care about us) it will lose an even larger
share of the notation software market.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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