Re: Finale, Sibelius, LilyPond, etc.

[Eliezer Kaplan <zelwel...>]

OK. I've never seen either of these programs in action, but after hearing of 
Sibelius from a friend & then reading about it here I went and checked out 
their web site. I was all ready to just buy the thing and then I saw the $600 
price tag. Now the ad you saw for Finale- was that a full-featured program or 
just a subset? Is there a simpler, cheaper program out there that may not have 
all the bells and whistles, but does the basic tasks- converting MIDI to 
notation and playing back using the general MIDI 128 or some extension thereof?

As far as universal formats are concerned, please keep in mind that it's to the 
advantage of whoever does eventually win the market war to keep their 
technology proprietary.

                        EK


www.zelwel.com

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Fred Blumenthal 
  To: World music from a Jewish slant 
  Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:43 AM
  Subject: Finale, Sibelius, LilyPond, etc.



  A few comments on the discussion of music software. 
  We're the people reputed to scold each other for buying retail; I hope 
nobody's paying full Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price for music software.  
I'm much more familiar with Finale than Sibelius (and disagree about Sibelius 
being more widespread), but I note that CodaMusic, the manufacturer, sells 
Finale for about $600, and in an advertisement in "The Choral Journal" one 
source advertises Finale for about $200.  And sometimes an educational or 
religious discount might apply. 
  A comparison was made with the .doc format in word processing.  It's possible 
to copy and paste between Microsoft Word (.doc) and Lotus WordPro (.lwp), and 
this might be possible with other word processing programs, too.  And one 
format that these two programs share is Rich Text Format (.rtf).  So one could 
"save as" a file in Word as .rtf, open it in WordPro, and "save as" in .lwp.  I 
haven't experimented with copying or resaving between Finale and Sibelius (or 
Encore or LilyPond),  but I would hope the manufacturers of the commercial 
music software would be open to a universal format, one beyond .mid so as to be 
applicable to the print-ready score.  I might some day want to share scores 
with a shayner Yid who uses Sibelius.
  Fred Blumenthal
  xd2fabl (at) us(dot)ibm(dot)com