Try this on your piano... Digidesign buys Sibelius!

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 9:03 am

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cf ... &pagePos=4

Resonant Alien · Post by **Resonant Alien** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 10:33 am

I think that is Digi's (aka Avid's) market strategy these days.... they seem to be buying up everything they can get their hands on.....BombFactory, M-Audio (which also includes Izotope and Wizoo), now Sibelius..... I'm surprised they haven't pulled an Apple yet and turned their software acquisitions Pro Tools-only (like Apple did by making Logic Mac-only)>>>

Mr_Clifford · Post by **Mr_Clifford** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 4:21 pm

Probably the next version of Sibelius will only work if you have your Digi Hardware pluged in (even if you're not needing audio) and you'll have to buy a separate M-Powered version to use it with M-Audio hardware.

I just hope thay don't ditch the 'import MIDI file' function in Sibelius and put out a separate program called 'MIDI translator' that you have to pay another $1000 for, a la Pro Tools and OMF's.

I guess in some ways it's a logical move since notation is the one thing that Digi haven't even tried to implement in Pro Tools - and probably won't now I'm guessing.

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 12:15 pm

Now I'm REALLY glad I didn't buy Sibelius yet! This has just made up my mind to save up my cash for Notion. I can't afford to take the risk of buying SIbelius and having it stop work later on unless I buy Pro Tools.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 12:22 pm

mhschmieder wrote:Now I'm REALLY glad I didn't buy Sibelius yet! This has just made up my mind to save up my cash for Notion. I can't afford to take the risk of buying SIbelius and having it stop work later on unless I buy Pro Tools.

There is always Finale. have used it for years on many large projects and the results are always great.

chrispick · Post by **chrispick** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 12:25 pm

What's so terrible about Digidesign buying Sibelius?

bralston · Post by **bralston** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 3:49 pm

Most of the Sibelius user base consists of educational customers. Students, teachers, schools, etc...While their pro base is good, the money is in the educational market for this product. Hence, I don't see many changes to this happening in reality. There may be some cosmetic changes, but suggesting that Avid will make future versions of Sibelius run only with PT hardware installed in the computer or the likes...is just simply not going to happen. Little Johnny's family is not going to be able to to afford a PT system just to have access to Sibelius's features...likewise, most school systems these days will not be able to afford something like that either. It just makes no business sense to alienate a large part of your customer base and with this acquisition, the educational market is now a larger part of their base customer pool.

I simply see this as a way for Avid to diversify the products they offer and at the same time, gain access to the powerful notation features in Sibelius so they can be added to bolster Pro Tools' feature set. That is all.

In the end, I think this is a great thing for Sibelius users. More money will undoubtedly be thrown at its development and for professional users, more professional features will most likely be added in the future. Sibelius already has the ability to lock to QuickTime movies, making the process of scoring to picture within the notation program directly easier to do. I only see this becoming more integrated into the scoring process in the future. For example, Sibelius being able to generate cue sheets for composers, being able to import edl data from avid, pro tools, better import and export of MIDI data from Sibelius to pro tools and vise, versa, etc...

This is a good thing.

arth · Post by **arth** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 3:54 pm

I'm not sure "terrible" is the right word, but Avid these days seems more directed towards the consumer market than the professional market. Look at M-Audio and their web page; what they offer now is not geared towards pros and enthusiasts the way it was before.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that consumers can get more than $79 Casio synths and $100 Soundblaster sound cards, but I fear that the higher end and quality products might suffer somewhat from consumerism. What's "good enough" for a consumer might not be good enough for an enthusiast or professional who just can't risk having something break down or refraining from listening to a mix because the 10x4 interface is really only 8+2x2+2 half duplex...

Resonant Alien · Post by **Resonant Alien** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 7:01 pm

arth wrote:I'm not sure "terrible" is the right word, but Avid these days seems more directed towards the consumer market than the professional market. Look at M-Audio and their web page; what they offer now is not geared towards pros and enthusiasts the way it was before.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that consumers can get more than $79 Casio synths and $100 Soundblaster sound cards, but I fear that the higher end and quality products might suffer somewhat from consumerism. What's "good enough" for a consumer might not be good enough for an enthusiast or professional who just can't risk having something break down or refraining from listening to a mix because the 10x4 interface is really only 8+2x2+2 half duplex...

I kind of see it the other way around.....Digi (Avid) buying M-Audio made a lot of sense because then Digi can focus their attention more on the PTHD systems rather than messing around too much with the lower end LE interfaces like Digi 002 and such.....they just let M-Audio be the company that addresses the lower end interface market with PTLE bundled, and Digi focuses their engineers on the HD/TDM systems. This piece of it probably makes the Digi pro products better.

Mr_Clifford · Post by **Mr_Clifford** » Sat Aug 05, 2006 12:23 am

Resonant Alien wrote:I kind of see it the other way around.....Digi (Avid) buying M-Audio made a lot of sense because then Digi can focus their attention more on the PTHD systems rather than messing around too much with the lower end LE interfaces like Digi 002 and such.....they just let M-Audio be the company that addresses the lower end interface market with PTLE bundled, and Digi focuses their engineers on the HD/TDM systems. This piece of it probably makes the Digi pro products better.

That's the way I hear it as well from talking to sound engineers around the place. Unfortunately, that makes things not look so good for Digi002 & M-Box users.

In terms of the Sibelius buyout, I suppose at least it means that it will be pushed by Digi's marketing arm. I use it for professional scoring sessions and love it, but I think that for the development of Notation software BOTH Finale & Sibelius need to remain healthy and competitive.
A competing product coming out with a function seems to kick programmers into gear a lot more effectively than requests on user forums.

BradLyons · Post by **BradLyons** » Sat Aug 05, 2006 6:36 pm

Hmmmmm not sure how much I "can" say here, but I'll dance around the edge of the cliff a little so to speak. Avid is NOT focusing on the consumer market but rather investing in that side of things. They want to make smart business and investment decisions, with the advent and massive growth of many home and project studios they see this as a way to invest in that market both in their own company and in that of the consumer. Those that know me know I am a DIE-HARD ProTools HD guy (I have two HD3 Accel systems myself) and if I chose ProTools LE for any reason, I would choose the Digidesign options v/s the M-Audio and ProTools M-powered for various reasons. But there are many out there who can't afford this option and truthfully, don't need to go the Digi LE route BUT want ProTools in some way. Buy purchasing M-Audio, they made this possible to be even more affordable to the consumer without taking away from their own product line. I know that might sound contra-dicting, but it's providing a source of product that otherwise may not have been sold by them.

In buying Sibelius, I can un-officially say this.... THE BIGGEST LACKING FEATURE IN PROTOOLS HAS BEEN NO NOTATION AT ALL! Until 3-4 years ago, it wasn't a big deal. BUT the studio has changed today which has changed the way we work. This has been a feature request over and over and over and over so my best "guess" <gr> is that you'll start to see notation integrated into ProTools. For someone like myself who has been using Finale for years, this won't make me switch. However it will be an immense help to export notation out of my compositions and tracks into Finale. Digidesign and Avid are making their products better both by investing and diversifying.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Sat Aug 05, 2006 8:38 pm

Are there any hints that Sibelius will become LESS compatible with the output from other DAWs?

Shooshie

arth · Post by **arth** » Sat Aug 05, 2006 8:49 pm

Sibelius (and Finale for that matter) is so "oh, you can't do that with THAT software, then you need THIS software too, for $xxx extra"...
I know, they need to make a living too.

Anyhow, for notation, I run Rosegarden and Lilypond on a Linux box. The price is fantastic, and the apps have come a long long way.
(Now if only MOTU could open the API so enthusiasts could write Linux drivers for MOTU devices too, I'd be happy. But that's a different issue.)

m2 · Post by m2 » Sun Aug 06, 2006 10:16 am

Probably the next version of Sibelius will only work if you have your Digi Hardware pluged in (even if you're not needing audio) and you'll have to buy a separate M-Powered version to use it with M-Audio hardware.

I just hope thay don't ditch the 'import MIDI file' function in Sibelius and put out a separate program called 'MIDI translator' that you have to pay another $1000 for, a la Pro Tools and OMF's.

I guess in some ways it's a logical move since notation is the one thing that Digi haven't even tried to implement in Pro Tools - and probably won't now I'm guessing.

I agree with those that see this as a positive. It would be counter productive for AVID/Digi to want alienate both it's existing customer base as well as the one they acquire when they buy a company. That's part of the reason you do it. With PT being stronger on the audio side than it's MIDI functionality it makes sense for them to work on that.

I know it's a favorite thing on this forum to attack Digi for any and everything ProTools related but perhaps this is really a non- issue for MOTU users. For what it's worth DigiTranslator is NOT $1000.00 - more like less than half that. Translating Open Media Format is completely different from moving MIDI which has always been an open architecture protocol. Particularly with 'Standard MIDI files' and such. Probabaly Digi WILL now try to implement notation into PT. But, will it be as elegant as DP?!

Sibelius has always been a contender fighting for market share from Finale. Perhaps by tapping into the Digi users they can gain some more ground. It's really the Finale users who should be concerned about being pushed out by some functionality that Sibelius might gain from this acquisition.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Sun Aug 06, 2006 10:48 am

Something is bothering me a little about this acquisition, as well as the acquisitions of Opcode, eMagic, and other small companies being bought out by the bigger ones etc.

Upstarts (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were upstarts once!) cannot hope to develop an application or device that has any chance of competing with the big boys. Their marketing resources are just too powerful. If you do produces a competitive product, they will either see that you go out of business, or buy you themselves JUST to put you out of business.

People who actually DO "think different" (and for all that I don't use Sibelius, my understanding is that it DOES think very differently from Finale) don't stand a chance in promoting their ideas as we are force fed the globally available and distributed products by the companies with the $$$ and power (READ influence) to place those products in the glossy magazines and sexy ads.

Innovation is driven by sales and accountability becomes non-existent. That is why we still have bugs in our programs, vaporware and unsupported applications and hardware. The people who actually invented much of this stuff are mostly out of the picture.

Two icons remain as far as I am concerned. Bose and MakeMusic. My experience with tech support and csr svc with both companies is par excellence. Apple came close for a while, but since the iPod and iTunes, csr svc and loyalty to the consumer base has dwindled.

Bottom line; The CEO's do not have the end users at heart, they have the shareholders and their pensions at heart. THAT is what drives acquisitions, not some nice guy wanting to integrate notation into Pro Tools.