sibelius
A Quick Look At Sibelius 5
September 03, 2007 Filed in: Tech Stuff
Sibelius 5 is the most recent
version of the composition and music layout
tools by Sibelius Software. It is also the first
version to ship as a Universal Binary for
Macintosh computers – making a very anticipated
release. The previous PPC versions run terribly
on Intel Macs, so I was excited to download a
demo for the most recent version.
Installation was as simple as can be hoped with any OS X application. Simply drag the application to your Applications folder, and you're done. The rest of the application feels much more Mac-like than version 4 did, but some strangeness still exists. The most obvious example is the application toolbar, which just looks out-of-place.
Other visual bugs exist throughout various dialog boxes, but this strange piece of UI design stares at you all the time Sibelius is open. Regardless, the rest of Sibleius' interface is very simple an unobtrusive.
clean and simple – Sibelius does a good job at avoiding distraction
an instrumental part in Panorama view
Sibelius 5 also makes it easy to extract parts. This was really a new feature with version 4, called Dynamic Parts, but, since I'm still using Sibelius 3 at home, this feature continues to impress. You simply write your score, choose a part from a menu, and the part immediately appears. This is a huge timesaver.
Another innovation to Sibelius 5 is the Ideas Hub. Using this feature is pretty similar to using loops in programs like GarageBand, and it's a fantastic addition to this application. SImply put, if you think of something off the top of your head, you can notate it out, open the Ideas window and save the clip of music until you are ready to use it – a simple process of copy and paste. Even better, you can listen to the music clips in the Ideas window, and double-clicking one of the snippets allows you to edit the notation.
viewing and editing an Idea
When I wrote about SIbelius 4 (which I never bought because the Intel Macs came along), I was pretty critical of Sibelius' fairly lame selection of quality samples when compared to Finale. While I still feel Finale has the better sample collection, Sibelius 5 has drastically improved in this area, including over 150 high quality instrument sounds. (Of course, many more can be purchased separately.) Also, Sibelius has gained support for VST and Audio Units – giving users greater flexibility in choosing virtual instruments from other manufacturers.
Other improvements include an improved equalizer, special measure numbering, easier cues, and instrument doubling in parts. Sibelius 5 also includes a font that writes the name of the note inside the notehead – a great addition for those of us working with younger musicians.
Compared to its competition, SIbelius feels much more intuitive than Finale, and it is far more capable than Encore or other similar products. Both Finale and Sibelius have distinctive strengths and weaknesses as composing solutions, but Sibelius has the edge in my book. For the most part, it gets out of the way and lets me concentrate on my creativity, which is exactly what this kind of software should do.
Installation was as simple as can be hoped with any OS X application. Simply drag the application to your Applications folder, and you're done. The rest of the application feels much more Mac-like than version 4 did, but some strangeness still exists. The most obvious example is the application toolbar, which just looks out-of-place.
Other visual bugs exist throughout various dialog boxes, but this strange piece of UI design stares at you all the time Sibelius is open. Regardless, the rest of Sibleius' interface is very simple an unobtrusive.
clean and simple – Sibelius does a good job at avoiding distraction
The New Features
Sibelius 5 features features some enhancements and new functionality over previous versions. Panorama view removes all page breaks from your score and views everything in one infinitely continuous horizontal system, creating a simpler way of viewing the music you are working on.
an instrumental part in Panorama view
Sibelius 5 also makes it easy to extract parts. This was really a new feature with version 4, called Dynamic Parts, but, since I'm still using Sibelius 3 at home, this feature continues to impress. You simply write your score, choose a part from a menu, and the part immediately appears. This is a huge timesaver.
Another innovation to Sibelius 5 is the Ideas Hub. Using this feature is pretty similar to using loops in programs like GarageBand, and it's a fantastic addition to this application. SImply put, if you think of something off the top of your head, you can notate it out, open the Ideas window and save the clip of music until you are ready to use it – a simple process of copy and paste. Even better, you can listen to the music clips in the Ideas window, and double-clicking one of the snippets allows you to edit the notation.
viewing and editing an Idea
When I wrote about SIbelius 4 (which I never bought because the Intel Macs came along), I was pretty critical of Sibelius' fairly lame selection of quality samples when compared to Finale. While I still feel Finale has the better sample collection, Sibelius 5 has drastically improved in this area, including over 150 high quality instrument sounds. (Of course, many more can be purchased separately.) Also, Sibelius has gained support for VST and Audio Units – giving users greater flexibility in choosing virtual instruments from other manufacturers.
Other improvements include an improved equalizer, special measure numbering, easier cues, and instrument doubling in parts. Sibelius 5 also includes a font that writes the name of the note inside the notehead – a great addition for those of us working with younger musicians.
Conclusion
Overall, Sibelius 5 is a very nice improvement over previous versions. Unfortunately, some interface bugs are annoying, and I'm beginning to question the priority of Macintosh development at Sibelius Software in recent years. Back in the early days of OS X, Sibelius showed up the competition time and again in adopting new Macintosh technologies quickly and effectively. Recently, however, the Mac versions of Sibelius feel more of an afterthought. I hope I'm wrong, but $600 is an awful lot to spend on software that sometimes just feels buggy. Fortunately, bugs can be fixed.Compared to its competition, SIbelius feels much more intuitive than Finale, and it is far more capable than Encore or other similar products. Both Finale and Sibelius have distinctive strengths and weaknesses as composing solutions, but Sibelius has the edge in my book. For the most part, it gets out of the way and lets me concentrate on my creativity, which is exactly what this kind of software should do.
Playing With Sibelius 4
July 16, 2005 Filed in: Tech Stuff
Lately, I have been playing around with the demo for
Sibelius 4. For those of you who
don't know what this is, Sibelius is a music
application that can be used to notate, print,
and play music. (It can actually do quite a bit
more, but this is not an in-depth review.) Very
simply put, a program like Sibelius is to music
notation as MS Word is to word processing.
I have been a Sibelius user for quite some time now. I used to swear by Finale, but it took Coda Music Technologies (now MakeMusic Inc.) so long aggravatingly long to release a Mac OS X native version of Finale that I jumped ship after playing around with a demo of Sibelius 2 under OS X. Now I am using Sibelius 3 for my daily music notation needs, so the announcement of version 4 quite naturally caught my eye.
From the onset, Sibelius 4 behaves more like a Mac OS X application than its predecessors. Instead of being an app in a folder with a bunch of other files it requires to operate, Sibelius 4 is a "package." Also, Sibelius 4 uses Mac OS X standard directories for filing specialized information.
Once the application launches, there are many small refinements and touches that instantly distinguish this version. The main toolbar is smaller and less gaudy. More useful commands are in that toolbar, and floating windows support transparency effects (like the Formatting Palette in Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac OS X.)
Next up is Dynamic Parts. One word: Wow. Now here come several more words. In the past, once a score is completed, you would have to "extract" the individual parts. This is time consuming, and changes you make in the score later are not reflected in any parts you've already extracted. Dynamic Parts changes this. As a score is being written, you can choose any part from a menu n the toolbar, and it instantly appears on screen. Any changes you make within that part are simultaneously reflected in the score and vice versa. This could potentially be a huge time saver.
Another neat aspect of Dynamic Parts is the fact that you can pull up all the parts in one dialogue, set the number of copies needed of each part, and have them all print out in a tidy little package. While this feature can't be completely tested in the demo, it is functional enough to give you a good idea of how it will work.
Finally comes the much hyped video capabilities in Sibelius 4. Basically, you can have a movie open that you might be writing music for, and you can see exactly how the music lines up with the video. This would have been so great to have when I was working on our fifth grade "Virtual Scrapbook" DVD. I'm just beginning to figure this feature out, but I am seriously liking what I am seeing.
First, there are a couple of visual bugs in the toolbar. The menus for Dynamic Parts and Page Zoom don't blend well with the toolbar, and the arrows to drop the menus down seem to be a few pixels off. Just as minor, launching the application seems to be slower than in Sibelius 3, but I'll write both of these off as quirks of pre-release software.
I'm not sure what I think of the playback controls being in their own floating window rather than in the main toolbar. It seems like unnecessary clutter. Also, in Sibelius 3, playback would begin from the last note you clicked on. Now you have to drag a slider to the point you want playback to begin at. This can be a real nuisance when working with long scores because the slider likes to reset at the beginning quite often.
As far as the keypad goes, it remains pretty much unchanged, but I would like to see it gain some flexibility. First, it would be nice if a tuplet section was added, so triplets, sextuplets, and the like could be controlled from the keypad. Also, a nice feature would be if the sections could be viewed simultaneously as expandable and collapsable sections. Again, I am thinking of something like the Formatting Palette in the Mac version of Office.
Expanding from that topic, many commonly used features, such as dynamic markings, tempos, clefs, and the like are buried in menus. While not suggesting that Sibelius gain the same visual clutter as Finale 2004, it would be interesting to see if they could include some kind of customizable toolbar in future versions of Sibelius where someone could keep commands they frequently use.
Finally, Finale has upped the ante on high quality audio samples by including 100+ sounds form Garritan Personal Orchestra in Finale 2006. Sibelius offers 100+ sounds with Kontakt Player Silver, but the real difference comes with the pitched instruments (instruments that can play a melody). Sibelius comes with 19 high quality pitched instruments. On the other hand, Finale 2006 will come with about 50 Garritan pitched instruments. To me, that seems like a point of competition which needs addressing.
The only real point of contention I have with Sibelius is Kontakt Player Silver. In its current state, the high quality GPO sounds included with Finale 2006 soundly trump what is included with Sibelius, and I'm growing more of the opinion that Kontakt Player Gold should not be a separate $150 purchase, especially when comparing the lists of instruments included in Kontakt Player Gold and those included with Finale 2006.
As I said, though, Sibelius 4 has some strong features, but Sibelius needs to continue to innovate and provide value. Much of Sibelius' current Macintosh user base is probably a result of Finale ceasing to be a value for several years. Now that they have that base, they need to work to keep it.
I have been a Sibelius user for quite some time now. I used to swear by Finale, but it took Coda Music Technologies (now MakeMusic Inc.) so long aggravatingly long to release a Mac OS X native version of Finale that I jumped ship after playing around with a demo of Sibelius 2 under OS X. Now I am using Sibelius 3 for my daily music notation needs, so the announcement of version 4 quite naturally caught my eye.
From the onset, Sibelius 4 behaves more like a Mac OS X application than its predecessors. Instead of being an app in a folder with a bunch of other files it requires to operate, Sibelius 4 is a "package." Also, Sibelius 4 uses Mac OS X standard directories for filing specialized information.
Once the application launches, there are many small refinements and touches that instantly distinguish this version. The main toolbar is smaller and less gaudy. More useful commands are in that toolbar, and floating windows support transparency effects (like the Formatting Palette in Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac OS X.)
Good Experiences
Dragging symbols and articulations around feels generally snappier. The Worksheet Creator is great and will save me a lot of time in the future. The Preferences dialogue box is much better than the one(s) in Sibelius 3. I like having the option to activate and deactivate floating windows from the toolbar, and the Mixer seems more responsive and less buggy than in Sibelius 3. Furthermore, the new ability to copy & paste into a word processor works as documented for the demo. It pasted fine into Word and into Pages, but it looked horrible. I can't complain, though, because it's a documented limitation of the demo.Next up is Dynamic Parts. One word: Wow. Now here come several more words. In the past, once a score is completed, you would have to "extract" the individual parts. This is time consuming, and changes you make in the score later are not reflected in any parts you've already extracted. Dynamic Parts changes this. As a score is being written, you can choose any part from a menu n the toolbar, and it instantly appears on screen. Any changes you make within that part are simultaneously reflected in the score and vice versa. This could potentially be a huge time saver.
Another neat aspect of Dynamic Parts is the fact that you can pull up all the parts in one dialogue, set the number of copies needed of each part, and have them all print out in a tidy little package. While this feature can't be completely tested in the demo, it is functional enough to give you a good idea of how it will work.
Finally comes the much hyped video capabilities in Sibelius 4. Basically, you can have a movie open that you might be writing music for, and you can see exactly how the music lines up with the video. This would have been so great to have when I was working on our fifth grade "Virtual Scrapbook" DVD. I'm just beginning to figure this feature out, but I am seriously liking what I am seeing.
Iffy Experiences
Overall, the demo of Sibelius 4 is very good, and I am going to have to get pretty nit-picky here. (I love it when software is so good that I have to look for the flaws.)First, there are a couple of visual bugs in the toolbar. The menus for Dynamic Parts and Page Zoom don't blend well with the toolbar, and the arrows to drop the menus down seem to be a few pixels off. Just as minor, launching the application seems to be slower than in Sibelius 3, but I'll write both of these off as quirks of pre-release software.
I'm not sure what I think of the playback controls being in their own floating window rather than in the main toolbar. It seems like unnecessary clutter. Also, in Sibelius 3, playback would begin from the last note you clicked on. Now you have to drag a slider to the point you want playback to begin at. This can be a real nuisance when working with long scores because the slider likes to reset at the beginning quite often.
As far as the keypad goes, it remains pretty much unchanged, but I would like to see it gain some flexibility. First, it would be nice if a tuplet section was added, so triplets, sextuplets, and the like could be controlled from the keypad. Also, a nice feature would be if the sections could be viewed simultaneously as expandable and collapsable sections. Again, I am thinking of something like the Formatting Palette in the Mac version of Office.
Expanding from that topic, many commonly used features, such as dynamic markings, tempos, clefs, and the like are buried in menus. While not suggesting that Sibelius gain the same visual clutter as Finale 2004, it would be interesting to see if they could include some kind of customizable toolbar in future versions of Sibelius where someone could keep commands they frequently use.
Finally, Finale has upped the ante on high quality audio samples by including 100+ sounds form Garritan Personal Orchestra in Finale 2006. Sibelius offers 100+ sounds with Kontakt Player Silver, but the real difference comes with the pitched instruments (instruments that can play a melody). Sibelius comes with 19 high quality pitched instruments. On the other hand, Finale 2006 will come with about 50 Garritan pitched instruments. To me, that seems like a point of competition which needs addressing.
The Unknown
There are some things about Sibelius that are still unknown. I've had some pretty weird bugs pop up when exporting to audio in Sibelius 3 from time to time, and I hope those are resolved in Sibelius 4, but that feature is unavailable in the demo. Also, as I understand it, Sibelius 4 will pre-load any sound libraries selected to eliminate the lag that exists when inputting notes or playing back a score for the first time. While this is sure to have benefits, I wonder this will affect Sibelius memory footprint. These questions won't be resolved until i can get my hands of a shipping copy, though.Conclusion
Sibelius 4 is shaping up to be a very strong release. It retains the clean interface of Sibelius but almost to a fault. Again, the fact that many common items are buried in menus and dialogue boxes can be daunting to a user until they become well-versed in all of the keyboard commands. However, the benefits of Sibelius easily outweigh such small quarrels.The only real point of contention I have with Sibelius is Kontakt Player Silver. In its current state, the high quality GPO sounds included with Finale 2006 soundly trump what is included with Sibelius, and I'm growing more of the opinion that Kontakt Player Gold should not be a separate $150 purchase, especially when comparing the lists of instruments included in Kontakt Player Gold and those included with Finale 2006.
As I said, though, Sibelius 4 has some strong features, but Sibelius needs to continue to innovate and provide value. Much of Sibelius' current Macintosh user base is probably a result of Finale ceasing to be a value for several years. Now that they have that base, they need to work to keep it.