Subject: RE: Tech: Sibelius vs Finale
From:
Artful Codger
Date: 20 Sep 10 - 11:21 PM
Publishers may only need exported MusicXML, which can be fed into their more expensive software to produce more professional-looking scores. Finale does support MusicXML export, though I can't vouch for how well their format is handled by other software. I generally dislike using higher-end music composition programs because they tie you into their format, and then you're stuck using their product (or exporting some bastardized version of your score, or reinputting it afresh.) As with all major corporations, it's all about the profit stream, never about the user.
Finale has many drawback which I find frustrating. Off the top of my head:
You can only place repeats and section bars at the end of full measures. In folk music, repeated sections frequently begin with pickup notes, and the end repeat mark is offset from the full measure bar line accordingly.
Similarly, you can only place key, clef, tempo and meter changes at the start of a bar. As with repeats, this is frequently not their most natural position. And you can't place fermatas over bar lines.
Keyboard input of dotted rhythms and triplets is klutzy.
The editing capabilities are klutzy--I find the product only useful for copying already completed scores. If you get the timing off, it doesn't allow you to just shift the entered notes, and particularly hashes note lengths which span bar lines (converted into tied notes, with no memory of how they were created). If you need to edit a bar, it won't allow you to temporarily exceed the capacity of the bar (to add some notes, then delete others), and if you delete notes first, it appends rests which you then have to explicitly delete or alter to add in the new notes. The copy/paste of note regions other than full bars I've always found unreliable.
For piano parts, you can't have one hand cross staves in the middle of a bar, certainly not with beams. At best, you can play games with layers and hidden rests.
It's difficult to notate holding a note while playing subsequent notes over it. This makes it particularly difficult to properly notate many piano parts.
You keep having to change "tools" to add things like articulation marks, and they aren't "sticky" (so that the default mark is the same as the last you selected), despite what the documentation claims.
You can't add an additional page for full or partial lyrics.
You can't hide staves which are unused for part or all of a line (such as when a song breaks out into a four-part harmony section), or relabel a lead part as a chorus part.
After adding new measures which flow onto a new page (by commands or by copies), the program often fails to allow you to move to the new page until you do some other repositioning operations.
You can't define your own score templates unless you buy their most costly product; instead, you have to use one of their predefined templates (which oddly lack some of the most common combinations, like "piano and voice") or set up the score yourself.
It doesn't properly handle MusicXML files generated from ABC programs, and it doesn't import ABC files at all. Forget about conversion.
If you fail to fill in any fields in the header information (like subtitle or copyright), they get filled with text like "[Subtitle]"--which also appears on print-outs! They can be temporarily voided with spaces, but upon reloading the score, the placeholders will appear again. (I insert non-breaking spaces, which seem to be retained and respected.) But some of the information you enter isn't included in the templates, and will not appear at all. The program does do what one would expect: automatically supply the information you supply, in default positions and order (if not explicitly inserted elsewhere).
In short, Finale appears to have been developed by programmers with little real experience doing anything but copying classical music (and only simple scores, at that). And it expects users to think more like programmers than musicians. It floors me that the user base hasn't burned the company's ears off with complaints. If Sibelius didn't cost so damn much, I've have ditched Finale long ago.
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sj
