Sibelius vs Finale

I have not used Sibelius, but I choose Finale because of the price.
Finale costs less than Sibelius, and you can crossgrade from many other notation software. You even get a discount of 100$ if you trade up from the free Finale Notepad.

Why does the board show this topic as having two pages when it only has one???

This would be the third post on the second page...

That's weird, when I clicked on the thread before the three posts above were at the bottom of the first page!

Now it's back to how it should be.

I prefer Finale to Sibelius because it's simply more powerful and I can do almost anything that I ask it to do. There are a lot of things you simply can't do in Sibelius without doing some kind of workaround to approximate what you really want (I won't lie, there are things like that in Finale, too). Most people don't realize that to be "intuitive and user-friendly," you sacrifice a lot of personalization options. Sure, MS Paint is easy to use, but you'll get better results with Adobe Photoshop.

On a personal note, I CAN'T STAND Sibelius' music font. It looks like children's music - like Piano Big Note Five Finger music. I half expect to see the note names in the notehead whenever I look at Sibelius' output. That, to me, is a major killpoint. I would be horrified and embarrassed to present that to a publisher.

Anyway, that's only my opinion, feel free to have a different one.

^Thats only one of a million fonts, the one they usually use on the tutorial video's and such. I just use the basic, professional looking font. But theres a ton to choose from.

I use Sibelius 5 and highly highly recommend. The only Finale program I've used is notepad and I couldn't get into it...though I didn't really try too hard as I only got it to play .mus files and I had Sib 5 with EWQLSO sat on my desktop.

But I've heard phenomanl compositions from people with Finale and people wth Sibelius, so really its whichever you find best to use.

Originally Posted by flint-wwrr

Sure, MS Paint is easy to use, but you'll get better results with Adobe Photoshop.

I understand your point but that's not the best analogy to use when comparing Sibelius and Finale as they're about as powerful as each other; the difference is small, certainly compared to the difference between Paint and Photoshop!

I think, actually, this debate is much like the "sequencer wars". Cubase and Sonar are quite different to use but both are beasts when all is said and done.

Really, unless you're composing extreme avant-garde music (and what I've heard from you suggests you're not Ed!), Sibelius will be more than good enough.

And since you're used to Sibelius and know how it works, I wouldn't bother switching if I were you.

Haha, too right I'm not composing avant-garde! I only started thinking about composing a few months ago. I much prefere connecting my MM6 to my computer, opening Cubase and hitting record. Playing about for a while, and then replaying what I played and selecting the best bits, then importing those into Sibelius and starting from there.
It might not be the correct way of doing things, but it seems simple for me

Well, to be a little snarky, the "defaults" that Sibelius provides and that I see a lot of posted here gives: a) horrible spacing, b) unforgiveable collisions, and c) extremely poor page layout... just to name a few things.

Then again, that could just be the users. I suppose if one were to spend time learning how to use the program correctly, one would get better results.

Probably just the users. My composition tutor at uni swore by Sibelius and hated Finale for exactly ther same reasons! I thought that was somewhat irrational as I know you can make beautiful scores using Finale, and I know your point of view is also not right as my tutor's work was pristine and as I've said, he uses Sibelius.

To borrow an F1 saying: The most important part of the car is the nut holding the steering wheel.