David, I think you have very accurately captured the situation with the text I excerpted below. And if we go back to the commentary offered by the new CEO upon acquisition, many of us thought his comments were truly bizarre, as they seemed to describe music notation as a fitness coach would describe weight lifting. In retrospect, it seems he was talking mainly about SmartMusic and had very little interest in Finale per se.
As recently as 18 months ago, I thought Sibelius was on a similar dead end, so I was just waiting for Dorico to become mature enough for my needs. The big missing piece for me was chord support, which came with 1.2 (or was it 1.1?) But I was intending to wait until release 2 to begin the commitment to the learning curve. I have had a Sibelius license forever but never really learned the product. The last time I seriously tried, there was no scroll view, and I just could not get past that. Of course they have had scroll view for a long time now, but then it looked like development was dead, so I didn't want to invest time in a dead product. But it appears to me that Finale has responded to Dorico by deciding there is no point competing, whereas Avid has responded to Dorico by making a real investment. So now I have to decide which product I want to invest the learning curve time in. Money for the license isn't a big deal. The big issue is the learning curve time, which is 100 times greater than the license money. I have a small transcription project to do with 2 weeks to complete it. I could probably knock it out in 3 hours with Finale. I'm starting the Dorico 30-day trial this weekend and will tackle this project while learning the Dorico basics. On 4/19/2018 3:48 PM, David H. Bailey wrote: > with SmartMusic, and its > subscription-only business model, it sits on a cash cow. As far as the > company is concerned, I'll bet they consider Finale necessary primarily > as a tool for people to create SmartMusic accompaniment files and it can > already do what it needs to for that without further investment in the > minutiae of avant-garde notation and without improving long-standing > bugs which will never get fixed. > > ...However, > for band directors and other music teachers in academic situations, it's > something that gives them objective data on which to assign grades to > students, and it takes very little effort on the band director or music > teacher's part. And once the assignments have been created the teacher > no longer needs to schedule time to hear every student, and students > can't complain "Mr. So-and-So doesn't like me so he gave me a D, when > SuzyQ, who got an A, doesn't play any better than I do!" > > That's been the course of the company for the past several owners. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: finale-unsubscr...@shsu.edu
