More info on Sibelius team at Steinberg!

[nk_e]

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/02/s ... tion-tool/

Worth a read.

[Prime Mover]

Between Avid and Steinberg, I would imagine Steinberg to be the better company to work for. Not a fan of Cubase, but I'm not a fan of Pro Tools either, at at least VST is a good development that one can attribute to Steinberg's abilities.

I didn't know Steinberg was a subsidiary of Yamaha, that's cool too.

[groove]

Fantastic news.
I stoped upgrading Sibelius at v.6 when avid bought it from the twins brothers. They were asking ridiculous amounts for upgrades that didn't offer much. V6 covers my scoring needs quite well.
If they are starting from the ground up with fresh code, it's even better.

[mhschmieder]

I hate Cubase so am glad they aren't using its notation as the starting point and that it is likely to be a standalone program once done.

Having said that, I have yet to try a Steinberg product that behaves well on my Mac. WaveLab disappointed deeply, as did even the more recent HALion revival. Also, Steinberg is notorious for dropping products with no further support (though sometimes those same products get mysteriously revived later).

OTOH Yamaha themselves might have a vested interested in seeing Steinberg succeed with this notation app (e.g. maybe they would embed it in a large-screen Tyros workstation).

[mikehalloran]

We have a vision for a flexible, powerful music notation application that is equal to the task of notating today’s most challenging art music and capable of producing graphical results of the highest quality, while providing an environment for composing and arranging that is as close as possible to the simplicity of writing music with pencil and paper, or improvising at your instrument

A lot easier to say than to accomplish. I'll be on the sidelines not holding my breath. It will be exciting if they pull I off.

[stubbsonic]

It must be pretty tricky to make a good and useable notation program that is "all things to all people". I wonder how many folks use professional notation as compared to say, DAW's. I would imagine the user-base is potentially much bigger. I'm thinking if they can make a really intuitive, efficient, and well-documented product, there'll be a huge demand.

[Prime Mover]

Yeah, notation software is no joke. No one has gotten it right (sorry to say I never had the chance to use Mosiac), Sibelius has never gotten it.

Someday, I want to see a music notation program that's so seamless that it's no less intuitive than using a good text editor (not Word). No one's come close, but I do believe it could be done. The big problem at this point is the lack of immediate direction that these software packages provide. The few complicated but intuitive programs immediately point users toward certain methods of operating that will get the job done, and allow them to branch out from there. It's even a good design for the pro user, because pro users are often required to perform thousands of different operations, some of which their bound to not memorize well. Having a clear indication of how to perform a certain task is key to creating a transparent user experience. Notation software hasn't gotten there yet. Who knows, maybe Steinberg will come up with some ingenious ideas.

[Shooshie]

Mosaic got pretty close. It lacked some features, but you could do the majority of what you would find in a modern score of, say, 1930. That is, you could easily do Sacre du Printemps, or even West Side Story. But Stockhausen? Probably not.

If Mosaic gave you the ability to move any object to any position, and to add non-standard objects, as well as the ability to drag entire staves to new positions to make room for whatever you need it for, it would come very close to being the ideal notation software. It did allow you to export a page to MacDraw for further refinement, which would have been ideal if the final output could have been to PDF format. So, now that would mean Adobe Illustrator, and that would make it pretty flexible.

I'm using Sibelius now, and it impresses me, though I haven't used it enough to learn the first thing about it yet. I've got a long curve ahead of me, and while I miss Mosaic, I know it wasn't even close to perfect, though it was close to an ideal compromise. I don't know what it would take to make the ideal notation software, but page size has a lot to do with it. Scores are big. We need to output to big paper, which means big printers and software that easily runs them. The letter-sized score just doesn't cut it, but that's what most of us produce, because we don't have the hardware for larger scores.

Just rambling here. Never mind me.

Shooshie

[SteveInChicago]

I have used Steinberg's Cubase for years, with gaps in between. I knew it on the Atari 1024 in the early '90s, and picked it up again in 1994 or so. The developers are not afraid to drop old code, that's for sure. When they made the move to OSX they rewrote the app, and it literally took 10 years to get back some functions that were lost.

It's an app I love and hate, (and that many love TO hate ). It gives hope with super new features, but disappoints when one discovers that the feature is only partially implemented, quirky, or that something needs to be worked around to actually use it. (edit: this is not on all new features!)

In the past two years they have been trying to be more customer friendly, and they are more communicative on their web forum. They have been cataloging issues publicly. This is good.

All that said, Perhaps Cubase is a testing ground for Nuendo). There are points where the Cubase UI appears to have been designed by non-musicians, with bizarre results. It is certainly a sequencer on steroids that tries to be all things to all people.

Daniel Spreadbury (and the Finn bros of course) had a lot to do with MakeMusic (Finale) stepping up their development. Finale improved greatly due to the competitive pressure from Sibelius, and the support Spreadbury provided. That is a plus for us end-users. I hope that spirit flourishes in this project with Steinberg.

It will be fun to watch what they come up with. I'd give it a couple years though.

edited after fact-check

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I knew it on the Atari 1024 in the early '90s...

Ah, how soon we forget... Of course you meant the 1040... What a great machine that was in it's day. It's too bad it went belly up or we might all be using EditTrack and Dr. T's notation software today.

Thanks for the memory.

[SteveInChicago]

Ha! Yes! 1040. Seeing that box brought back memories!

Yeah, what a machine. MIDI and 1/4 inch audio inputs out of the box. You could plug it into a TV or computer monitor.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I don't remember the 1/4" outs. I don't think Atari had digital audio until the Falcon model, but I stopped at the STacy laptop and then went to a Mac. I still have my Atari Rainbow TOS chipsets! Now THAT'S hoarding! LOL!

[SteveInChicago]

Input, not output.

Wow, your photo brought back a flood of images from life back then...

It was a fun time for computers. I lived in France then and had a minitel from the phone company. It was the proto-internet. they recently shut it down.