Finale vs. Sibelius

[Everett]

Hello fellow notators...

I'm trying to decide which notation is best for me: Sibelius or Finale. A lot of the feedback about the 2 that I have read (on other sites) has not been helpful. Someone would write in and say "________ is so cool!!! You can write notes with it!" It's like asking "Which is better? Logic or Digital Perfomer?" and everyone answers "Audio recording is so cool!" I'm looking for more meaningful insights.

I had the opportunity to work with Finale the other day, and I have to say I was very dissapointed: it took a long time to do simple tasks, and the actions I needed to perform were buried in obscure menus. Yes, this was my first time using the program, but I did not get a sense that it was structured in a good way.

Some other composers I know find Sibelius to be much easier to work with. Is there someone out there who has worked with both programs and knows the advantages and disadvantages of each? So far, I'm thinking Sibelius might be a lot easier to use: there are a LOT of newsgroups and sites out there for frustrated Finale users, and very few for Sibelius users, so I have to draw the conclusion that the Sibelius users are having fewer problems.

Any thoughts, experiences, or hard core data?

Much Appreciated,
Everett

[cmchamp]

Everett:
I had the opportunity to switch from MOTU's Mosaic to Finale for free. Didn't do it because of the learning curve. I don't want to through another option your way (If you're a Mac user) but I have not ever had a notation that I couldn't do with Mosaic, and I have scored for some contemporary band composers.

If you are able, download a demo version of each. I know there is one for Finale.

Cory

[Avrora]

I do not know much about Sibelius but all my friends from Russia keep telling me that Sibelius is the best program to work with, instead of Finale. I'm working with Finale and I found lots of gaps in thi program. Wish to switch.

[dnino03]

Everett,

Go with Sibelius. It is really the best.

dnino

[retro-g]

This is my first post, and although a bit late for the original poster it could be relevant to others following the thread.....

I tried Finale 2000 and 2001 at school and found the interface to be counterintuitive. Finale required me to think like a programmer and not like the pencil and paper musician that I am. You shouldn't have to go on a fact finding mission just to line up lyrics on a lead sheet, use four voices, or get decent looking hardcopy. Back in the day, I don't think Finale did much "useability" testing with new users before releasing a their product. I'm no marketing guru, but it seems that as a manufacturer, one probably wants to attract, not repel, beginning users who could potentially be future customers. A lot of the students complained about how weird Fianle behaved when we trying to edit some basic stuff. Go look up "ergonomics".

Until version 2004, it seemed to me that Finale ads were always talking about piling on more advanced features, while never addressing the issue of interface design. Further, the Help was not arranged in a "How do I...." type of format. As a student, and now a band leader and arranger, I refuse to waste my time trying to figure out basic editing functions. Of course, I would expect to put in some time learning how to get MIDI playback to sound more realistic, how to do fancier engraving, etc

As a Sibelius user since version 1.0 (now have 3.0), I am generally pleased with its "useability". I was able to make lead sheets with lyrics in about an hour after installing the program....within an afternoon, a big band chart with individual instrument parts. A quiz, and lessons for my grade schoolers were easy to do. Very intuitive!

Sibelius better approximates using "pencil and paper" than Finale and most of the objects that appear on the screen are accessible and editable with a few clicks of the mouse. Best of all, the way most things are accomplished in Sibelius makes sense to me. Further, I have noticed that over the past four years, Finale is becoming increasingly more Sibelius-like.

Well, this is a forum and that's my opinion. :cool:

[Everett]

Wow... my first post was a long time ago. I've since had to work with both Finale and Sibelius for various composition projects and I must say that in my opinion, Sibelius wins by far.

We use Finale 2004(b) and Sibelius 3 in our lab. Finale has copied some of Sibelius's interface design, but it is still an awkward, clunky program. If you are working with a orchestral score of even modest size, Finale takes a LOOONG time to load, and a LOOONG time to render it for playback. Its screen refresh rate is still miles behind Sibelius.

In contrast, Sibelius 3 is loads fast, responds quickly to playback commands, and if anything, the newer version is more intuitive (yes, they even borrowed a few features from Finale). While Sibelius plays, you can grab the score and move it around like a pdf... Finale is far more rigid -- you can barely touch it while it plays back.

Both of them have new features to let you save directly to an audio file (the Mac versions do, at least... presumably Windows versions too). And I can't help but rub this in: the 2004 version of Finale was premature... even though it took them forever to release a version for Mac OS X, when it came out, it still had a lot of bugs (they should have waited longer). 2004b fixes only some of the problems. The founders of Sibelius first wrote the program in low-level code whereas I think Finale must have just copied what they saw Sibelius doing. I think the coding skills of the Sibelius folks are far superior -- their OS X version came out well over a year before Finale's and more importantly, it worked well the first time around.

I've asked visiting composers to our university (the professionals) which program they use, and again, Sibelius seems to be the winner.

Thought I'd share...
Everett

[Everett]

I hope others find this helpful:
http://www.fireproofsocks.com/finale_vs_sibelius.html

Some related docs are included re MIDI playback in Finale and Sibelius

[michaelhoddy]

I like things that are intuitive, and Sibelius works well for me as a result. Finale is at least as powerful if not a bit more so, but the learning curve negates this for me.

Like some others here, I was up and running on Sibelius in about an hour.

Arranging or writing is (or at least should be!) a creative process. I feel Sibelius does a better job of facilitating creativity rather than impeding it.

[dunky85]

Unless you are intending to do publishing then I would go with sibelius. The patches for the midi playback are some much easier to install, the interface with sibelius is so much easier to use than finale. I have used both I greatly preferr sibelius. If you are worried about money I believe that both companies offer discounts the longer you are with the company. Also I think that the photoscore program and the whole package that comes with sibelius 5 which is what I would hope that is what you are looking at because its not like finale and have a release every year that is pretty much the same, with sibelius everytime they re release the software there are a bunch of things that are better. It comes with online support. I think the best way to describe the two programs is Finale is designed by computer engineers that wanted to write a computer program to notate, sibelius is designed by musicians that want to use the computer to notate. I really think that unless you want to go into the business of publisher scores you should go with sibelius 5

[pianomanbob]

After reading the different comments about Finale and Sibelius, you know I will be changing my notation software to Sibelius very soon. I started with Finale2000 on a orchestral project and Finale was recommended. Boy, what a mistake! My days with Finale are over. I read somewhere that Finale is for Techies and Sibelius for creative musicians. Thanks for the important input.

[greatzot]

I've tried Sibelius and Finale briefly. I hated both. They were difficult to work with and required all kinds of keyboard "shortcut" memorization to notate efficiently. Needless to say, I didn't use either very long. The main advantage of Sibelius is the scanning software you can use with it. But don't expect it to get all the notes right. Expect to do significant cleanup in the score, especially if the original's faded, wrinkled, or irregular in any way.

I found that GVOX's Encore was far easier to use for general composition that doesn't require tablature, and very flexible. You can do 8 independent melodies on one staff, specify the number of measures per line and adjust as necessary after you've written parts out, move things around for printing, etc. It's the most intuitive and has the simplest user interface. That's what good software is to me--it lets me do the job with the least amount of effort and frustration.

If all you need is tablature software, PowerTab is by far the easiest to use and one of the two best, along with GuitarPro. GuitarPro has some capabilities PowerTab doesn't, but I still rely on PowerTab for most of my tabbing purposes because tabbing is so quick and simple with it. Coupled with the Yamaha SYXG50 midi driver, it rocks. The main advantage of Guitar Pro is it's more adaptable for non-guitar instruments and is capable of more voices and staves.

[radial]

Even though everyone here is favoring Sibeilius, I actually much prefer Finale. I really don't find it that cumbersome as everyone here is suggesting and the reason why I prefer it is really because it just sounds better. The Garritan string library that Finale uses has a better capacity of rendering more realism in it's playback environment. I found two samples from their sites that you can listen to and hear the difference. I think that in this arena, Finale is definitely by far much stronger. What do you think? Maybe that's why it takes longer to render a playback because of the Garritan samples.

1.listen to Finale (http://downloads2.makemusic.com/finale/2006/gpo/mp3/pictures.mp3)
2.listen to Sibeilius (http://www.sibelius.com/products/sibelius_sounds/essentials_mp3/orchestral2.mp3)