It still has its place and can give more satisfactory audio rendering due to its Synful-like approach vs. Notion is as easy or easier to use, but has been growing into more of an entry-level DAW for students of late. I might buy it just for that reason, for super-quick capture of initial ideas, as I tend to have blinding flashes where an entire orchestration comes to me at once and so often have to work quickly using short-hand techniques in order to minimize the loss of details (I can easily fill them in later if I use my well-developed mnemonic devices). I give Encore the highest score by far for ease of use and speed of workflow out of the box. I'm sure we can create our own anyway, in most notation programs. And most of the variants are either inconsistent, don't follow standard conventions, or are easily derived from a smaller subset of useful templates. How useful are these in reality though? I rarely ever write a traditional score myself - almost all of my compositions diverge significantly from "standard instrumentation", regardless of genre or ensemble size. Sibelius does have the most score templates, followed closely by Encore. Apparently, Sibelius is oriented towards students. I guess they think this "feature score" will inspire creativity. Also, I usually work late at night and don't like audio "surprises". When I am launching a notation program, the last thing in the world that I want is for some "feature score" to play back during the initialization of the app and potentially wipe out whatever multi-part score I have in my head that I am racing to annotate. One of the most annoying things about Sibelius 7 that I couldn't figure out how to turn off, is the music playback at startup time. Encore and Notion both did a superb job of importing MusicXML saved from Finale, as well as a better job of importing MIDI. I can't remember if Version 7 is the first release of Sibelius to support MusicXML, but it is laughable - lots of errors on import, and an unreadable result, plus an inability to do untainted round-trip exchange. I still don't quite understand the notation workflow itself, but I was more concerned about overall usability, compatibility, and features, and Finale clearly has the most complete feature set (for advanced needs) of any current notation program, by a mile. It didn't take too long to discover how to customize and configure Finale more to my liking, and I now find it quite easy on the eyes. Sibelius 7 isn't even in the running it is easily trumped by Encore. I finally got around to a more thorough cross-comparison of notation tools tonight, and Finale 2012 wins hands-down. I didn't check its import/export options yet or whether it support MusicXML. Some prefer it for initial composing elements, until more detailed arranging phases of the workflow. I can see some use for it, but not for serious classical composing - it's way too limited in its features. I downloaded the demo for the revised version of Encore late last night as well, and it's a toy. Given that Michael Tilson Thomas is the only well-known conductor or musician I know of who prefers Sibelius (and maybe because Avid is quite present in the SF Bay Area due to Digidesign being headquartered in Daly City), I WANT to like FInale more than Sibelius, in spite of those dizzying 3D GUI elements. I doubt I would use such long labels when creating fresh notation from within the program. But this mostly shows up when importing MIDI, as I label my tracks for the articulation given that I use multiple tracks in many cases to cover that. the right-hand side of text if they are more than a few characters long. For instance, staff labels get clipped on the left-hand side vs. Nevertheless, there seem to be way too many quirks for such a mature program. Yeah, scroll view is much better during composition and arrangement stage - I'm too tired at this hour to discover the shortcuts after enabling Speedy Tools (none of my guesses were correct), but am more motivated now that I have legible type and a friendlier layout and workflow.
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