From Mosaic to...?

[AleCerto]

During the last 12 years I've been using MOTU Mosaic as my notation app (I'm using now an old G4 MacOS9 bootable to switch to "Mosaic OS").
Since I'm finally going to update/upgrade my whole sw and hw stuff (DP7 included) I'm also going to lose my notation friend.
Where am I going to go?

- DP7 QuickScribe Editor: it looks simple (and poor) enough and it finally seems to have the chords, text and lyrics option (and it's a little bit Mosaic like, too).

- Sibelius: it might be "the choice", powerful and "not so hard" like Finale (in my own mind at least), it's a little bit expensive though (JFYI, in Italy I can't competitive upgrade from Mosaic to Sibelius... *#%!)

- Notion: I do not know anything about it but it looks very interesting (can I share/use the sound library and plug-ins in DP as "independent" virtual instruments?)

Any help and suggestion will be appreciate.
TIA

P.S. I hope this is the right forum.

[Frodo]

Salute e Benvenuto.

No, I wouldn't expect DP's QuickScribe Editor to be a definitive solution where notation is concerned. I use Finale, actually, and find that it does everything I need it to do for professional quality notation. However, I still the bulk of my ground work in Digital Performer. Once I get an orchestral score written, I'll enter the notes into DP very quickly and then export the resulting MIDI file into Finale. It has worked very well and has saved me tons of time.

If one is not doing orchestral scores, then the notion of doing chord changes and a number of other notation techniques more common to non classical music will always be tricky to prepare convincingly in a DAW.

If you have not used either Sibelius or Finale, it may not matter which one you choose beyond a personal preference. That you would want to use one or the other is critical if serious notation is at all important to you. If you are a Finale user, there's not reason to switch to Sibelius unless your co-workers are using Sibelius. Conversely, if you are a Sibelius user, there's no reason to switch to Finale. It just gets needlessly expensive with little benefit to the user.

[mhschmieder]

Notion 3.0 came out recently as a free upgrade, but requires an initial 20-30 GB of free hard disc space on the system drive, which I don't have, so I unfortunately have to wait for a new computer to install it. Therefore I cannot give you direct feedback on what sorts of ways you can wire its audio into DP (via ReWire?).

The main two reasons I bought Notion over Sibelius, Finale, Encore, or the others, are that it was designed primarily with composers (vs. publishers) in mind and thus has a more intuitive workflow more akin to working with paper, and it isn't based on MIDI and thus has much more resolution (up to 1000 steps vs. 128 steps).

I believe it supports both MIDI and MusicXML import/export, but would have to check the latest version for the level of detail supported (full vs. partial). For some strange reason the latest version adds multi-track recording, but maybe that is implemented in such a way as to make it easier to redirect the audio to a true dedicated DAW?

They have lots of good notes, tutorials, and videos at their website, so I recommend checking it out. It's a different approach than the other notation apps, but there's a cheaper version, a guitar tab version, and a free demo to try, so I recommend trying the demos as well as those for Finale, Sibelius, Encore, and any others I may have forgotten about.