Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 08/08/12 12:21, martinwguy wrote:
>> That's a very good point. The learning curve of Lilypond is steep,
>> whereas poking at note positions on a visible stave lowers the bar
>> immensely. In this respect Sibelius has done a great service to the
>> world of music by providing a working example of such a tool long
>> before the open-source world caught up with musescore.
>
> Finale was the original pioneer[*], but Sibelius made a great advance
> in usability, and also was (and is) superior in terms of beautiful
> engraving. Unfortunately that came at a cost in its own right -- I
> remember well that earlier versions of Sibelius were _very_ good at
> engraving conventional music, but if you wanted to step into more
> customized territory, it was not pleasant. Finale was (and probably
> still is) much better if you wanted to define custom notations.
>
> But you're right, the main benefit of a tool like this is to minimize
> the gap between making a change and being able to see and hear the
> result.

It is also omitting the need to learn the note names and stuff.  For the
step between a WYSIWYG text editor and basic text input, you at least
have a keyboard with letter names written on all the keys, and the
letters look similar to the letters on screen and are entered in
sequence.

With music, you first need to learn the note names before you can even
type them into LilyPond.  A Midi keyboard, while not being notation and
thus not necessarily perfectly useful for singers or non-keyboard
players, at least has a more direct connection to music.  But we all
know how much Midi input for LilyPond sucks: nobody really uses that.

-- 
David Kastrup