Avid Sibelius 7 Crossgrade Reviews

5.0/5.0 based on 2 customer reviews

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Customer Reviews

Gordon
from Bryan, Ohio, USA
March 5, 2012Music Background:
brass band, choir, military band, hair band, the usual...

WoW!

The sounds are beautiful! I recently bought the MOTU symphonic instrument in a bid to add realism to playback / recording in my old sibelius package, but the sounds that come with this are just phenomenal. the layout (with the famous ribbon) is logical, albeit a little fussy - you alter the score then have to open a different tab to get back to your playback controls- but a working knowledge of shortcuts takes care of that. The piano is beautiful.

Jim
from Eastern NC
January 11, 2012Music Background:
Keyboards, bass, reeds, guitar, autoharp.

Sibelius 7 (from Finale 2008)

After trying for a number of years to get used to the arcane logic??? found in Finale (admittedly, my use is sporadic, in bunches, and I had to re-learn it each time); I went for the Sibelius 7 crossover - at a very attractive price (only a little more than it would have cost to update Finale to the latest version).

Wow - a program that operates in a LOGICAL manner. I am still working through the tutorials - running it on Windows 7 Professional. It acts like a Windows program - doing things with Windows shortcuts does the expected thing. It also acts like Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 - with the ribbon. I switched to Office 2010 a few months ago, it was a bit of a hurdle to get used to the ribbon - but that same interface works in Sibelius.

Don't think that it makes producing a score trivial - there are still a lot of things to do to do the job right - no full featured notation program is going to be super-easy to learn, and I still have a ways to go in learning the fine points. But a workflow that works WITH the user instead of against the user - priceless.

Example: in 3/4 time, with three quarter notes in a measure, you decide to make the second one a half note. Finale flat refuses to do it, unless you first remove the third note, then it puts a rest in place of the third note, then you can change the second note and do away with the rest. Sibelius - you change the second quarter note to a half note - boom, the third quarter note disappears (since there is no longer room for it).

Not only that - one of my pet peeves with Finale was the way that it would suddenly MOVE everything after I had taken pains to get the page like I wanted it. This might also happen with Sibelius, but I haven't yet seen it happen.

Did I mention that the sound library sounds excellent, and that it can save scores in older Sibelius formats, or MusicXML so that you can share with friends who are using older versions or other programs? Well, it does.