Sibelius vs. Finale

I spent a long time deciding which music notation program to use before I finally bought Sibelius back in January of this year. I had used various versions of Finale that band directors had since back when I was in high school, but I never really liked it. Back in the day Encore was pretty good, but I don't think it's been updated for years. Finale was originally supposed to be brought to Mac OS X a ... well, a while ago. I don't remember the original date, but it got pushed back to August 2003, then that month they delayed it for another couple of months, when that came around, it got delayed until January 2004. You can get some more background over at MacMusic.org. I also found it funny that many of the features listed for Finale 2004 were things that you either got for free moving to OS X, or things you were required to do to move to X - you can see a list of some of them here.

I was down at the NAMM show in Los Angeles when they finally did release the OS X version, and a quick glance at it showed that it still had some of the same problems that the classic version did - slow redraw, problems muting sounds, and other things that I can't remember now.

I tried the demo of Sibelius at some point in the middle of all this waiting, but it was difficult to get much done in the crippled demo version that doesn't allow saving files (Not that I blame them for this limitation - it's cool that you can try out 99% of the features of a pretty expensive program for free). I don't know exactly how I found it, but I started looking at Virtual Drumline from TapSpace at that time as well, and they mention their preference for Sibelius just about any chance they get. Of course one of their employees is sponsored by Sibelius, so I guess that makes sense...

Anyway, I bought Sibelius (and Virtual Drumline) despite the fact that the band director was (and is) still using Finale. And I couldn't be much happier with my decision.

Sibelius does a few smart things for percussionists - first off, it plays back any diddles you write in the music. They are much easier to create (there is a shortcut key in the numeric keypad), and the extra glyph for the diddle stays with the note when it gets moved. Since diddles are used quite often, this saves me a lot of time. And since it actually plays back the sound as it was written, I don't have to translate anything in my head when I listen to it.

The second nice thing for percussionists is the mapping capabilities for notes. In Sibelius you can assign different notes on the staff different pitches, and each different notehead can have a different pitch as well. I tried doing some of this in Finale, but it was pretty time consuming and didn't work well. One of the silly things about Finale was when you would try to create a standard snare drum note it wouldn't sound like a snare drum. You needed to put a sharp on the note for it to sound right (and to make it more confusing, the sharp was invisible once it was there). The maps in Sibelius are pretty easy to use, and once you have them set up, you can easily import them into other documents.

Sibelius has quite a few other features that I really like that aren't specific to percussion - it's really easy to create rehearsal letters, and the program is smart about handling them (it doesn't print them for every line in score form, but it does print them for each extracted part). It's really easy to make selections for different parts of the music and edit them, something which required lots of different tools in Finale.

I really like the ability to move around the score by clicking and dragging on the background of the page. It's something that I didn't like or use much at first, but now that I've spent over 100 hours using the program, I really can't do without it. In fact, I sometimes find myself trying to drag the background in Safari, Mail, and Xcode to navigate around :)

Of course there are issues with Sibelius, like there are with any program. It's got a few scrolling bugs, and the mixer window is pretty slow. Every once in a while I get a crash when plugging or unplugging my MIDI device, and waking from sleep sometimes aggravates it more.

Overall, I'm really glad I switched to Sibelius. It's very well suited for percussion writing, and well... that's what I do :) I'll keep updating this page with more notes as I think of them - feel free to let me know of any corrections (or info about then new Finale 2005, since I haven't tried it).