Eh, the only thing that looks "NEW" is the Idea thing. The other
stuff.......who cares? They have a Scroll View. Wow. Cool. Finally. And
a new hand font. Wooo. And GPO sounds. Oooo.
Look, if you want to go, go. Until Sibelius can open my Finale files
without MusicXML, I'm staying with Finale. I don't feel like changing
thousands of files into it. Plus, Finale does everything I want it to do
and I am awaiting some excellent improvements.
AND, I do use the SmartMusic program, and Sibelius cannot create files
for that. That is a big minus in my book. I kind of have a love/hate
relationship with SmartMusic, but generally, it is a great program with
some annoying bugs.
dhbailey wrote:
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.
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