@evanevans said:

dfhage,

No we are not at cross purposes. I understand you loud and clear. I have been doing this for 20+ years, and I 100% understand every word you said.

Blimey, I am behind I thought Sibelius 5 only came out last week?? Maybe I'm cracking up, what with this and being stalked by Daniel Spreadbury I fear I may be losing my mind.

Oh well, it wasn't much of a mind to start with.

Dave Hage
Planet Zarg

@jbm said:

Hey Evan, it's been a long time! Hope all's well.

From the Sibelius 5 "Stunning new sounds and playback" page:

"...and sustained notes get continuously louder or softer along the hairpin."

Doesn't this mean we've got hairpins playing back?

J.

Well I think it's using CC11 or CC7. That's not good enough for us to be able to use crossfade layered instruments, that only is controlling the volume or relative volume respectively, not the timbre. And in my tests so far, hairpins didn't do anything at all during sustains.

It's truly amazing how far behind the notation software has been in MIDI. These are things that the professionals created and have known for decades. Crossfade layers have been around for over 10 years, at least.

Evan Evans

I'm forgetting that you're not on VI yet, right? On the VI you could assign cell crossfades or velocity crossfades to pretty much any controller, afaik. So we should be able to get nice playback from hairpins pretty easily, I should think.

J.

@jbm said:

I'm forgetting that you're not on VI yet, right? On the VI you could assign cell crossfades or velocity crossfades to pretty much any controller, afaik. So we should be able to get nice playback from hairpins pretty easily, I should think.

Yeah, I'm not VI yet. Buying my copy of SE today (except for the missing muted horns issue I'm excited). I am not sure WHAT continuous controller Sibelius spits out during hairpins, but in my initial tests, Kontakt nor Sibelius' mixing volume did not respond to any CC7 or CC11 messages. And of course, I am talking about data being sent while a note is sustained. Not velocities of new notes.

Evan Evans

@dfhage said:

Blimey, I am behind I thought Sibelius 5 only came out last week?? Maybe I'm cracking up, what with this and being stalked by Daniel Spreadbury I fear I may be losing my mind.
...
Dave Hage

I think you focused on the wrong part of my message. Did you try the steps I showed you??

Evan Evans

Sibelius ability to load AU/VST plugins and effects directly is a significant advantage. Finale is apparently limited to NI or "powered by NI" plugins because of an agreement beween MakeMusic (Finale's parent company) and NI. Rumor has it that this agreement will end in 2008 or 2009. For people who have spent years becoming adept at Finale, switching to Sibelius would mean a significant investment of time and effort in learning to become similarly skillful with new software whose design is quite different. Everyone has to decide whether such an investment is justified by Sibelius' new features.

Finale does have some advantages - - including the ability to have multiple channels on the same staff (less important with Vienna Instruments software), a MIDI Tool that allows users to write any kind of controller data and the ability to create hidden symbols (symbols that appear onscreen but do not print) with assignable MIDI meanings (e.g channel, CC number and value, tempo changes, etc.) It is possible to use a separate host program such as Logic or DP for any and all AU virtual instruments and effects and address the host program and instruments via the IAC drivers. This is my current setup and it works well. Finally, rumor has it that the next iteration of Finale is likely to address and fix many hitherto unfixed bugs. Hopefully this rumor is correct.

@Another User said:

Finale does have some advantages :
- multiple channels on the same staff
- a MIDI Tool that allows users to write any kind of controller data
- hidden symbols with assignable MIDI meanings (e.g channel, CC number and value, tempo changes, etc.)
- It is possible to use a separate host program such as Logic or DP for any and all AU virtual instruments and effects and address the host program and instruments via the IAC drivers.

FYI, Sibelius has been able to do all but one of those things for over 3 years now. The one thing it cannot do atm, is multiple channels on one staff. However there is a workaround for that as well (invisible instrument change).

Evan Evans

Evan:

You're right that I haven't looked at Sibelius in a while. At a time before the VI sample player allowed one to have as many articulations as you'd like on one MIDI Channel, Sibelius' one staff = one channel limitation seemed a deal breaker for me. (I was working on a realization of a string quartet at the time. A reasonable - - but far from ideal - - MIDI performance required 80-90 MIDI channels worth of different articulations. Turning a string quartet score into an 80-90 stave affair seemed rather unwieldy to me. This drawback has been obviated by the appearance of VI software where the theoretical limit is 1728 articulations per MIDI channel.) When I tried Sibelius' demo version, I posed some questions to Sibelius' TS people and the anwers I received were neither timely nor cogent, so I gave up.

I should have put the part about workng with a host program for virtual instruments in a separate paragraph as I'm aware that Sibelius has the same capability. What I meant to say was that for those who've made a significant investment in time to become adept at using Finale, there is a workaround for Finale's current inability to run any but NI and "NI powered" plugins. I've been using Finale since version 1.5, so, while I acknowledge that Sibelius has some advantages, I'd prefer not to have to start at square one with an entirely new software package unless absolutely necessary. I suspect that some others might feel similarly.

Okay Steve. I see what you are saying now. Good points.
Evan Evans

Horray! If only they'd make a 64-bit version now..

Seriously, though, hopefully Finale will have to follow suit now.

Yes, indeed. But I think Finale must be tied into some sort of license with NI for their vst support. Perhaps that license has a timeline, in which case we may see full hosting from Finale in the future. Mind you, I feel like there's something kind of sloppy about Finale in the last few versions. I don't know what it is exactly, but it's starting to feel extremely bloated, to me. Personally, I'd like to see some innovation, and attention paid to the basics again - for example, I'd love to see a true non-mensural mode in *any* notation program. That would be innovation, IMO.
I'm in the Sibelius camp for now, and relatively happy. We'll see what Sibelius 5 is like in actual practice at the end of the month, when it actually ships.

Perhaps someone should build a totally modular music notation environment. One in which the user can assemble functional elements to determine precisely how their user experience works. Now that would be cool...

J.