scoring software - buying advice please

[Roland Genske]

Folks, I want to do scoring in a separate program. This should include scanning some of my existing printed sheets (does that work well?), transposing (important!) and of course printing.

 

Should I go for Finale 2004 or are there alternatives? I currently score in Cubase SX, meanwhile SX2, but this just doesn't feel right

 

Thanks for your input!

[Roger Hooper]

Sibelius is excellent; you can download a demo at Sielius.com. I score documentaries and pop stuff using Logic Audio for the actual creation and recording of the music. I also create lead sheets and piano/vocal arrangements for a publishing company, and use Sibelius. When I need to give parts to live musicians for the scoring work, I use Sibelius. It is very easy to learn, very powerful, works with midi great, playback is good and can be adjusted for rubato, while the music stays in the bar lines...it is a wonderful program to work with. Sibelius rocks.

[Roland Genske]

Thanks Roger. OK, Sibelius alone costs 659 Euros. I assume I would need the Sibelius & Photo Score Scan bundle which is 868 Euros. Finale 2004, however, only costs 577 Euros and has the scan option already built-in. Hmmm, not an easy decision...

[NoLights]

I've used Finale for several years and it keeps getting better. It may have a slightly steeper learning curve than Sibelius - but once you get used to it, you can work fairly quickly. I think Keyboard did a "shoot out" recently. Check that out.

 

The other thing to consider is whether you'll be sharing files with other composers/arrangers - and if so, what do they use. Most of the people I work with around here use Finale. Find out which is more widely used around you.

[Superbobus]

At this moment I'm running Finale 2004 and although it's still not an easy app, it's much better than it used to be. I hope that the Sibelius chords are not tied to notes anymore. That was something I really hated, but Sibelius is very cool, only haaard to get over here, legally that is.

Keeping the price difference in mind, I would go Finale 2004.

[Geoff Grace]

Originally posted by nolights:

I think Keyboard did a "shoot out" recently. Check that out.

http://www.keyboardmag.com/images/0304/cover.jpg

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Geoff Grace]

(Double post)

[Roland Genske]

Thanks for all your suggestions. I'll get the Keyboard issue before doing my decision

[moj]

Before I got Finale 2003, I tried the Notepad program that is offered free at their website. It's a very basic version of the full-blown program, but it helped me to get familiar with Finale 2003. Also, try the Finale 2004 demo. It's the full program without the save function.

 

Finale is a complicated and deep program to learn and I get great info from the Yahoo Finale Forum; check it out. Yahoo Finale Group

[Superbobus]

Before checking out other forums, anybody know how to get chords, made in a score, in EVERY extracted part in Finale? I wouldn't like those chords over and over again, you know.

[guestuserguestuser.com]

Thought I'd revive this thread, since I'm thinking about buying either Finale or Sibelius.

 

One thing I'd like to find out is how chord entry is handled in these programs.

 

I've looked at the Finale Printmusic demo, it seems to write chords using one font, on one 'level', as it were, like this:

 

AMaj7, or AmMaj7

 

It does give a few different alternates, but none of them look the way I'd want them to look.

 

When I write a chord like Amaj7, for instance, I expect it to look the way it does in certain jazz fakebooks, although I have my own slight variations on things. I want the 'maj7' part to be in a lowercase font, on the 'upper level' relative to the capital A. And I want the 'm' (for minor) to be on the 'lower level'. That's the way I write chords when I'm doing it by hand.

 

Like this (here'a crude ASCII approximation of what I'm talking aobut. I hope this displays correctly for everyone - please forvive the period to the left of the capital 'A', it was the only way I could get it to display close to the way I intended, since this bulletin board does not allow me to select an ASCII font, and because it removes blank spaces):

 

I like my "A maj7" chord to look approximately like this:

 

./\maj7

/--\

 

And my "Am maj7" chord to look something like this:

 

./\maj7

/--\m

 

Do programs like Finale or Sibelius give good control over the way chords appear? And if they do, how user-friendly is the way they do it?

[Bartolomeo]

I use lilypond .

 

It's free.

 

The output quality of the printed score is arguably better than any other product, and there is considerable ability to tweak the output to make it look however you want.

 

It is fiddly to use, typical computer geek toy stuff. If you can get over that, it's great.

 

There no scan feature, though.

 

Bartolomeo

[Dave Horne]

You can save money when buying a program if you qualify for an educator discount. I joined the NAJE or MENC for $25 or $35 just to save big bucks for the educator discount.

 

Also, _buy_ the program through someone in the US to save even more money. I bought Sibelius under my name and had it sent to my brother's address in the US. He just repackaged it, sent it to me and that was that.

[cnegrad]

Superbobus, you said:

I hope that the Sibelius chords are not tied to notes anymore.

Are chords still tied to notes in the most recent version of Finale?

[Dave Horne]

I'm using Sibelius 2.11 and you have the option of how you want the chords to be entered - next note or next beat.

 

I never upgraded to 3.x because Sibelius never improved their chord fonts. If you use their Jazz font you are offered a capital M and a _smaller_ capital M for a lower case 'm'. I complained, they noted my complaint but never came up with an improved font. I use a discontinued font from their version 1.x. The font I use is not perfect, but is better than the Jazz font that is offered.

[mjm]

Sibelius all the way in my opinion. Also if you've got a rubbish GM set-up, Sibelius 3 comes with the Native Instruments Kontakt player (mit ASIO).

 

Not too sure about Photoscore but I've do all my scoring in Sibelius 3, I've been using Sibelius for years and it's great. I've tried a demo of Finale recently and just can't get my head round it. I will learn it though since the film music world is torn between the two.

[Roland Genske]

Thanks for bringing this up again. I'm sorry that I didn't come back to report what I actually chose.

 

What I had to do was just to transpose a few existing sheets. My idea was to buy a program which could scan the sheets, transpose them and create a nice print.

 

On the 2004 MusikMesse in Frankfurt (where I met Mr. Bryce at the A.D.A.M. booth BTW) I found Capella Scan, a 149 Euro software which perfectly does the scan part. I then used the Capella 2004 demo version to transpose and print the results. Although this doesn't allow to save the final result, it perfectly served the purpose and saved me some Euros.

 

I don't score a lot, so I finally found that buying one of the big ones would just be a waste.

[vicsant]

Some questions on Sibelius:

 

1. How do you get rhythmic notation in Sibelius? This is rather easy in Finale 2004?

 

2. Is is possible to have different numbers of bars per line in a system?

[Superbobus]

Originally posted by cnegrad:

Superbobus, you said:

I hope that the Sibelius chords are not tied to notes anymore.

Are chords still tied to notes in the most recent version of Finale?

Here's the update. Finale 2004 ties the chords to notes too, but at least I can type a chord, press space bar, type another chord, press space bar, press space bar until I reach the right note. With Sibelius I couldn't do that. Maybe because it was a pretty old version?

[Dave Horne]

Originally posted by vicsant:

Some questions on Sibelius:

 

1. How do you get rhythmic notation in Sibelius? This is rather easy in Finale 2004?

 

2. Is is possible to have different numbers of bars per line in a system?

If you are serious about learning Sibelius, I would suggest going to their online support. I have received answers from the guys who actually started the company. They are very serious about keeping the customer happy and informed.

 

Sibelius.com

 

I have used both Finale and Sibelius, and the learning curve on Sibelius is very easy. You really have to read the first 30 or so pages from the manual which takes about a day and after that you consult the book if you have problems.

 

The one thing about Sibelius I really like - small file size. A 32 bar lead sheet in Sibelius in about 17k. In Finale it is about 10 times bigger.

[Michelle ggurl]

I use a Finale-based product that is a good compromise between Notepad (too basic) and full-blown Finale. It is Coda Systems' (maker of Finale) PrintMusic.

 

For $70 or something like that, it does weird time signatures, multiple staves of multiple types, has flexible layout options (you can still nudge notes and lock staves and do all sorts of layout tweaking), and generally does everything I found Finale to do, which I used to create the graphics for a music book I wrote and published (granted those were just one-staff lead sheets, but I did a LOT of massaging of text to communicate exercises and theory points). There are obviously things full-blown Finale does that I simply didn't use. But the only Finale feature I'd really want that PrintMusic DOESN'T do is convert your graphic to EPS for publication.

 

However, I don't know how many people really need that. I did, because I was laying out the music as a graphic element in a desktop publishing app, and having a book printed. Who knows, you may be able to directly distill PrintMusic output to a PDF file and do the same thing ... there are many PDF writer programs that claim to be able to distill into PDF anything that you can print on a printer.

 

So maybe PrintMusic is a possible other option to consider ... Coda has a chart comparing their products on their site.

 

BTW, I've since used PrintMusic to generate lead sheets for studio musicians, as well as 3- and 4-part string arrangements (viola and violin) for a studio session.

[guestuserguestuser.com]

Originally posted by geekgurl:

I use a Finale-based product that is a good compromise between Notepad (too basic) and full-blown Finale. It is Coda Systems' (maker of Finale) PrintMusic.

Geekgurl, have you used PrintMusic's chord symbol designer tool? (can't remember what it's called)?

 

See my question above about whether it gives you control over the way the chord symbols appear.

 

Additional question: if it does let me design my own chord symbols the way I want them, do they still behave the same as the built-in chord symbols (i.e., do the transpose, etc.)?

[Michelle ggurl]

Hi Richard, I believe the WAY chord symbols appear is not customizable; they may be, but I didn't really see that. I delved into it but only briefly so there may be a workaround that wasn't immediately apparent. Anyone else know??