Simply awesome (Sibelius)

Member Name: moistoist

Product:	Sibelius
Date:	14/05/01 (132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Everything, Everything, and everything...

Disadvantages: Pricey

(For those of you who don't know, Sibelius is a score writing program. This is basically like a word processor, but for music ; with it you can create music that looks exactly the same as what you would find in any sheet music you buy from a publisher - in fact many publishers actually use Sibelius (eg. Faber, Hal Leonard)
It's only really a tool for professional musicians, or diehard home music enthusiasts - and it's aimed more at the classical school of composition as opposed to popular music. Check out the website www.sibelius.com and download the scorch plugin to get some ideas as to what it does.)



There has already been much praise heaped Sibelius' way, so I thought I'd review it in a more factual way so you can evaluate it against Finale.

The end results are startlingly similar, with a few exceptions such as the clefs which are quite different. Sibelius will actually accept the Finale score font in case you truly love it, but the Sibelius font itself is now almost industry standard.


Typesetting is a dream. The interface takes a little practice, but it's really very obvious and intuitive.
Don't bother with recording a la midi sequencer style input. The results aren't great, as the resolution is too fine - and if you turn the resolution down it goes into 'thick' mode and doesn't work well!
The free score scanning software which you can buy later is a waste of time as it simply isn't good enough. It picks out some notes, but I just got very bored waiting for the (poor) results. Not that I can see many uses for it myself, but hey.

Sibelius is awesome. It will do anything you want it to. If it can't do something via usual rules, you can draw the symbol you want and import that instead. I use it to knock up orchestral scores of thiry or so lines of music - print this at 70% to A4 size from A3 on a good laser printer, and take it to my local printers to
copy onto whatever size I need it. On good paper, and with a decent binding, this is the professional standard - you can't tell it apart from the material you'd find in your local music shop.

It's too expensive for students - I wish they'd release a 'student' license like Microsoft do - but if you can chalk up the cash you must buy it. I prefer it by far to Finale, but that's only my opinion.

Summary: