[Dixielandjazz] Sibellius or Finale or Encore?

[David Richoux]

I have used Finale (several versions for my Mac) and it is fairly 
complicated to use and has some very annoying "features" - but I guess 
it eventually does work as advertised. I tried scanning in some music 
and found out that the original has to be a perfectly printed 
black-and-white image. No hand written notes, no shades of gray, and 
you have to have a very fast computer with a lot of memory to use the 
program in general. I have managed to hammer out some jazz charts for 
large band but it took way longer that it should have...

The manual (not printed out) is very poorly written and it is hard to 
find specific information about tools and features of the program. 
There are so many options and controls that allow some very complicated 
outputs but it is very hard to figure out what will happen  between the 
input of data and the final output. By the way, I am not a novice in 
using complicated computer programs - I have learned several CAD, 
Photoshop and other graphic design & printing software and Finale is 
more complicated than all of them put together! I do not consider 
myself to be a "power user" of Finale, nor am I very experienced in 
arranging - I am sure there are people who have figured everything out 
but I don't have another lifetime to do that ;-)

I have not used the other two programs at all so I cannot say if they 
are better or worse.

Dave Richoux
On Oct 10, 2005, at 2:57 PM, Robert Reck wrote:

> snip
>
> Sibelius and Finale both have a "scanner" feature, but I am not sure 
> how well it works.  I have never tried it and I have not heard good 
> things about it.
>