Sibelius goes all Finale on it's own ass!

bdr · Post by **bdr** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 5:02 pm

SIb 7 is very enjoyable to use. Anyone that wants to give it a fair go at seeing how easy it is to get around should download the demo and then spend an hour or two at James Humberstones website where he has a series of 'Learn Sibelius in 1 hour' videos.

http://web.me.com/aftertrace/Sibelius_i ... index.html

..although they are made for Sib 6 most of the principles are the same. Also there are Sibelius 7 tutorials included with the program.

The sounds in Sib 7 are a great improvement, so much so that I'm doing a lot more work in it and correspondingly less in DP. There are also very clever 3rd party 'soundsets' that integrate libraries such as the EW Orchestra into Sibelius. It's such a joy to write a string part that uses arco, pizz, tremolo, etc and not have to think about keyswitching or calling up the proper sound.

Contrary to other comments, I've found the Sibelius forum extremely helpful with even basic questions. One of the lead programmers posts there and is also generally available via email. The only thing I don't like is Avid's policy of paid tech support after one 'freebie', frankly I think that's a joke. But I've never had need to use it due to the help I've got via the forum.

To reverse MLC's opinions..I found Sibelius very musical from the start (v.3) and super easy to learn, whereas Finale felt unmusical, and more like a music word processor. But it's probably because I haven't spent enough time with Finale, and at the moment I don't need to. Sibelius is not perfect, but I don't find myself looking for workarounds all that often.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 5:39 pm

And some people actually like Logic. You never know...

leigh · Post by **leigh** » Wed Dec 07, 2011 7:21 pm

bdr wrote:SIb 7 is very enjoyable to use. Anyone that wants to give it a fair go at seeing how easy it is to get around should download the demo and then spend an hour or two at James Humberstones website where he has a series of 'Learn Sibelius in 1 hour' videos.

http://web.me.com/aftertrace/Sibelius_i ... index.html

..although they are made for Sib 6 most of the principles are the same. Also there are Sibelius 7 tutorials included with the program.

The sounds in Sib 7 are a great improvement, so much so that I'm doing a lot more work in it and correspondingly less in DP. There are also very clever 3rd party 'soundsets' that integrate libraries such as the EW Orchestra into Sibelius. It's such a joy to write a string part that uses arco, pizz, tremolo, etc and not have to think about keyswitching or calling up the proper sound.

Contrary to other comments, I've found the Sibelius forum extremely helpful with even basic questions. One of the lead programmers posts there and is also generally available via email. The only thing I don't like is Avid's policy of paid tech support after one 'freebie', frankly I think that's a joke. But I've never had need to use it due to the help I've got via the forum.

To reverse MLC's opinions..I found Sibelius very musical from the start (v.3) and super easy to learn, whereas Finale felt unmusical, and more like a music word processor. But it's probably because I haven't spent enough time with Finale, and at the moment I don't need to. Sibelius is not perfect, but I don't find myself looking for workarounds all that often.

I've been a Finale user since version 1.

I ordered Finale 2011 upgrade and it would not recognize any Core Audio devices on my system. After speaking with a support person who said, "I can't get my Mac to work; I'll use the Windows machine", I was put on hold for a while and eventually told, "It's a bug." That's all she said to me. I was furious. I paid for the upgrade and they didn't care that it didn't work for me. That's when I decided I was through with MakeMusic.

I had not liked Sib 6 but in my anger, I ordered Sib 7. I had an 8-minute full orchestra project with a deadline a few months away so I decided I would do it in Sib 7 as a way to force myself to learn it.

I followed the Sib recommendation to do at least the first 3 tutorials and after them, I started my project. After about a week, I started to notice that Sib really stayed out of my way and just let me write music. It's so easy to play back sections just by selecting them, typing "Y" and pressing the space bar. In Sib 6, I couldn't get large, sans serif time signatures that extended outside the staves. In Sib 7 I did it in less than 5 minutes. That's when I knew I was never going back to Finale.

There is some Finale workflow imitation and initially I tried it but decided early on that I would just learn the Sib system and I've been glad that I did.

It's genuinely multi-threaded and fully interrupt-driven! I can save while I'm playing back! I can resize the page or panorama view and it just changes the view quickly and cleanly while playing flawlessly. If I switch to another app, I can click on the Sib window and it immediately comes to the front. With Finale the only way I could do it was to actually click the Finale icon in the dock.

The Focus On Staves makes it really easy to for me to work on widely separated staves. It fully supports Unicode!

I agree with bdr that the Sib 7 sounds are a great improvement. It's very easy to hear orchestral balances now. Here's the Sib 7 sounds version of my piece: http://leighdaniels.com/mp3/Curiosity.mp3
Some of the percussion sounds aren't what I specified (eg. hi-hat w/18" crash cymbals) but they are good enough for a mock-up (I couldn't do bowed crotales, though!). I don't need to have completely lifelike playback. It's good enough for the conductor to know what it will sound like with a real orchestra.

There's a plugin that identifies places where cues might be needed. It's very easy to select some bars and then paste them as a cue into the target stave. There are a ton of plugins available.

When it came time to produce the score, I had hardly any work to do because most of the defaults were fine for me. And it was so easy to make a condensed score! I haven't started on the parts yet, but the defaults are pretty decent to start with.

My main frustration has been with how it handles title and blank pages. I could find no easy way to insert and delete pages. There are no rulers and moveable guides to help lay out the front matter for scores. I gave up and did all the text front matter in InDesign and just combined a PDF of it with a PDF of the music part and sent that to the printer.

I still haven't gotten my head around House Styles yet but I think once I do, I'll be able to quickly develop a library of templates to replace my Bill Duncan Finale templates.

This is a long post but I'm excited to be using a tool that let's me write easily, is being actively improved, and well-supported both by Avid and the user community.

**Leigh

dosuna11 · Post by **dosuna11** » Tue May 22, 2012 1:44 pm

This version 7.1 is so buggy I can't get any work done. I am a long time user from 2.0. It has crashed more than any version of any program I have owned since 1985. It always has been so stable. Does the word avid come to mind in this new version? The font size on the interface is nearly invisible. Back to version 5 for me. Any ideas?

Nigel Keay · Post by **Nigel Keay** » Tue May 22, 2012 2:06 pm

Have you got the very latest release (7.1.2)? When that came out a lot of users were much happier with the performance.

dosuna11 · Post by **dosuna11** » Tue May 22, 2012 10:00 pm

Nigel Keay wrote:Have you got the very latest release (7.1.2)? When that came out a lot of users were much happier with the performance.

Yes that is what I have. My thoughts are not healthy on this version. I even did a reinstall. Today I was just moving a chord symbol......crash and burn moving text ......crash and burn etc on and on. Took forever to find how to turn off things that were never on in previous versions. If I want guitar chord frames I will ask for them. I like my minor 7th chords mi7. I turned that off and it reappeared in today's work. How do I feel about the organization of the ribbon interfaces?

My time for no pay assistance is past so now to get help from Avid I must pay to get help on a program that is FULL of bugs.

Oh and the sounds are not that good compared to East West which it would not see so I had to open Plogue Bidule and run an IAC into it to get it to work. So you ask Plogue sees this as an AU so does DP so why won't Sibelius? Tried twice to trick Sib to re access the AU's and VST it's still blind as a bat. No problems with version 5 4 3 or 2. All AU and VST good to go. Thanks for the thought. I have vented!

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Wed May 23, 2012 6:10 pm

>Well, at least Sibelius won't get "eaten" by Finale like Encore did<

Encore is dead but it doesn't know it. For a long time, I used it for church because it was so fast. My wife won't use anything else.

GVOX has apparently become a part time mom and pop. Its "upgrades" are so that it keeps working - almost as advertised now. Encore hasn't added any real features since Passport Designs (what a horrid company) owned it. The look is much nicer once they got a v5.0.x that actually worked.

The current 5.0.6 does not open old 4.5.5 files, neither does it work on OS 10.4. Version 5.0.5 and 4.5.5 do work on 10.4 so I have an old G4 where I open my old files in 4.5.5, save, open in 5.0.5 (which doesn't work in SL or Lion), save then copy to my iMac where I can open in 5.0.6.

As bad and limited as it is on the Mac, I would hate to be a Windows user (actually, I have 2 licenses).

Encore still wants the big bucks. Were it $49 or so, he might sell enough to make it a good competitor to the Finale Songwriter edition - which is the level where it's at.

I still use it for a quick melody/chord/lyric lead sheet. It is fast. Other than that, I am recovering my old files and hoping I never need to convert them to Finale. I have not played too much with the XML export but I am not liking what I see.

Don't get me started on SmartScoreX. Worst waste of $300 ever. Doesn't work properly in SL or Lion - still - but they don't tell you that.

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:40 pm

Not sure of the full implications for those here who own Sibelius or are contemplating buying it, but the entire workforce has been dismissed and the software will now be maintained in Kiev, The Ukraine.

http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/ ... issal.html

I don't have the link currently for the talk about the Kiev switch, but it was part of an official company announcement yesterday or the day before.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Thu Jul 05, 2012 2:15 pm

Nyet!

Say it isn't so, comrad!

Finale. Built in the USA, pardner'

NazRat · Post by **NazRat** » Thu Jul 05, 2012 2:21 pm

Avid moved PT programming to the Ukraine a while back. Maybe the video apps are next.

dosuna11 · Post by **dosuna11** » Thu Jul 05, 2012 3:07 pm

Hope they will improve it!

Nigel Keay · Post by **Nigel Keay** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 4:43 am

dosuna11 wrote:Hope they will improve it!

The Sibelius community is hardly optimistic about that, to say the least; have a look at: sibelius-community

dosuna11 · Post by **dosuna11** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 10:30 am

Wow! So true. Sibelius may go the way of......

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 11:29 am

dosuna11 wrote:Wow! So true. Sibelius may go the way of......

Printed manuals? LOL!

nk_e · Post by **nk_e** » Tue Jul 10, 2012 2:59 am

bdr wrote:SIb 7 is very enjoyable to use. Anyone that wants to give it a fair go at seeing how easy it is to get around should download the demo and then spend an hour or two at James Humberstones website where he has a series of 'Learn Sibelius in 1 hour' videos.

http://web.me.com/aftertrace/Sibelius_i ... index.html

..although they are made for Sib 6 most of the principles are the same. Also there are Sibelius 7 tutorials included with the program.

<snip>

Anyone know if Humberstone has posted these somewhere else? The link is to a MobileMe site that is closed.

Also FYI, MacProVideo is starting a Sibelius 7 series of tutorials. The first one is free. They appear to be organized by specific types of notation projects.

Cheers.

MOTUnation.com