Comments on: Finale 2007 Announced: Intel-Native, Parts Linking, Video Scoring, Sibelius Leapfrog Continues

By: nalooti

nalooti — Wed, 30 May 2007 15:02:01 +0000

Hi
i’m completely new in these.
I play guitar (jazz) and have some “real books” sheet music.
I want a way the soft “reads” the music notations from a file then plays it on my PC so i know what that piece sounds like.
Of course the other way is play it on my guitar, but it takes time to decode it and before doing that i want to know if i like that music/song.

Is this soft something for me ?
What category of soft i’m looking for and what’s your suggestions.

many thanks

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:36:41 +0000

“Sibelius is like word while Finale is like photoshop”

That has to be the worst analogy I’ve ever heard.

By: Luke Harrald

Luke Harrald — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:56:11 +0000

it’s funny not seeing any irate users popping up, but I also agree with the above comments. The Sibelius/ Finale rivalry has been great for users, and as a Finale user since version 3.1, I can only say that certainly many Finale users are pretty loyal.

On the Finale vs. Sibelius interface front it was once put to me like this… Sibelius is like word while Finale is like photoshop. When I use sibelius, the context sensitive cursor nearly drives me mad, I just can’t get used to it. The tool switching in Finale really doesn’t bother me at all… and if you become fluent with macros and keyboard shortcuts Finale is a very fast editing environment. Also the fact that the software does nearly nothing for you makes it inherently flexible- far more so than most other editors.

Viva la difference! and my both products continue to push each other to greater heights.

By: Derek Williams

Derek Williams — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:45:07 +0000

I agree with all the above - the first scoring program I used was the then cutting edge Apple Mac program Professional Composer by Mark of the Unicorn quickly replaced by the very powerful but soon orphaned Composer’s Mosaic which actually had integrated Parts/Score from the outset. Long after Finale surpassed it, and Sibelius was announced, I continued to use Mosaic and to this day regret its abandonement, especially since my huge library of scores won’t work under MacOS X. Finale I always find way too hard and slow to use - having to go drill down to another mode for almost every different action and forever looking up the admittedly excellent documentation is way too complex for me - so for the time being, I use Sibelius 4.1 and love it.

Derek Williams,
Ph.D. student, Edinburgh University.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:27:38 +0000

Well, and before I get an irate user on here, I know there were at least a couple of other programs that had attempted integrated parts — it’s one of those things that these programs should just have; it just happens to be hard to implement. Ditto the film scoring / integrated video stuff. I look forward to seeing how Finale implemented these features, to see how well they work.

By: Tim Thompson

Tim Thompson — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:12:03 +0000

I have to say that the dynamic linking of parts to the score is something many Finale users have been screaming for for many years going now–since before there was a Sibelius. As with several other things, it takes Sibelius doing it first for Finale to have the appropriate pressure to finally do it. I really hope that now that Finale seems to have gotten out of its legacy code mire that many of the things long-time users have been asking for will come more easily. We asked and asked for more flexible and powerful MIDI controls for playback, but they finally largely mooted that with the human playback features and GPO instrument set, which are all pretty well implemented (thanks again to Sibelius for the pressure) and look to be even stronger now.