On 9/3/2019 1:31 AM, Raymond Horton wrote:
So, I have a publisher interested in publishing a work of mine, but
says they need the file in Sibelius format (groan!)
I have a friend who uses Sib, but he is extremely busy and I hate to
impose upon him. it’s a fairly large file, 33 pages for brass band,23
staves, 3000 frames. How much work is involved, approximately? It
looks like I could purchase a lifetime license for the software for
$200, would this be a good time for me to learn the program? (I am 66
years old with a few health problems in my past Including a spine
injury which makes sitting at the computer for long hours much more
difficult than it used to be - I am not certain of my longevity
prognosis, and I would rather spend my remaining years trying to
create something new then learning new software. Financially, this is
not a mass market work, so paying a professional to convert this would
probably not make sense for me, although I haven’t been published much
and I would like to get it out there even if I lose a little. In the
meantime, I am trying to look for other publishers.
Any advice will be very much appreciated!
I know that it took me a long time to get comfortable with Sibelius. I
first bought it at version 2.11 and was very frustrated with it because
I kept trying to use my Finale workflow, which just didn't work. There
were problems with Sibelius at that time, things like not being able to
playback D.C., D.S. or other complicated repeat structures. All that
got resolved in the versions which came next.
I did upgrade to Sib3, then to Sib4, each time trying to get comfortable
with it but always thinking "Gee, in Finale I could do [whatever it was]
*this* way, which isn't possible in Sibelius."
Finally with version 5 I told myself to stop thinking of Sibelius as
"Finale-East" (since it came from Great Britain) and to learn how to use
it from a brand-new program with no relation to other similar programs.
I read the manual (printed back in those days) and worked through the
increasingly more complicated tutorials and got very comfortable with
it, even though I still did most of my projects in Finale.
However as I worked more in Sibelius I found that I was able to do so
much of my notation work so much easier in Sibelius that now I rarely
use Finale at all.
My point being, that whether it will be personally or professionally
worthwhile for you to make the jump to Sibelius depends on whether you
can shed your many years of Finale skills while learning Sibelius. If
so, then you should make the jump. If you are a died-in-the-wool
creature of habit, you may well be too frustrated at the different
workflow in Sibelius to find it rewarding at all.
I would offer to do the conversion for you, but even though MusicXML has
come a long way as an inter-application transfer file system, it is
still not perfect and would require much back-and-forth sharing of files
as you proofread the Sibelius version (it could be sent as a PDF file --
Sibelius exports score and all parts in one file, or just the score or
just all the parts or a selection of parts into PDF very easily and
quickly).
If you're not in a rush I'd be willing to give it a try, no charge to
you, given all that you've contributed to the Finale world over the
years. I would be working on it in the "nooks and crannies of my
schedule" so if you're on a timetable this might not be the best.
But certainly a first-try would be easy enough to do -- export as
MusicXML from Finale and e-mail the file to me. Just the score would be
best. Then if the score translates easily I can use the Sibelius linked
score-and-parts feature to create the parts, so you would end up with a
Sibelius file your publisher could use.
I'm an early riser so I would be doing the work early in the morning
when I have my first couple cups of coffee.
David H. Bailey
--
*****
David H. Bailey
dhbaile...@comcast.net
http://www.davidbaileymusicstudio.com
_______________________________________________
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
