A music program question...

[Highpitch]

Nah, not the type at you find in school.

I want to do a little arranging for concert band, and would like to use my PC to do the majority of scoring, and have it command my printer to make decent charts for each player.

It ought to do these operations (among other things, hopefully) without a lot of fiddling:

1...Take a line of music and convert it to the proper key/notation by my selecting the instrument that will play it.

2...Have the ability to cut-N-paste a line at a time.

3...Have the ability to scan a chart I already have using something akin to OCR to allow me to edit it as notation.

So far, I've heard about Finale, Scorch (sp), and Sibelius. I am NOT a computer geek, nor do I want to become one. It is merely a tool for me, and I'm not really interested in 'updates' for bigger-faster-better....just something simple that works.

Your advice is most appreciated.

DDG

[eupher61]

I think you refer to Sibelius Scorch, which is part of Sibelius. Sibelius has been discontinued by its owner, Avid, but is still available from many dealers. It does everything you ask, at least purports to, in the full version. There are smaller (read as CHEAPER) versions which do not do as much. Support from the publisher is nil.

Finale, same deal with versions. The full version will do all of that in theory, and the smaller versions will not. Finale was sold in the past, and the support has been shoddy at best.

Both have educators discounts available. It is considerable for each.

[PMeuph]

The problem for you will be OCR, which is dreadful in all music notation products. AT BEST you can only scan a single line part. Scores cannot be scanned in unless you want to do so much work that manually entering it would be faster. That is the dead honest truth.

I would disagree with this...

I use Photoscore lite that was included with Sibelius 7 when I purchased it last year.First, If you transfer a pdf that Sibelius or Finale, it transfers everything flawlessly. (There are plenty of free scores available on IMSLP that have been typeset by various users).

I have also found that it works really well with certain fonts and certain difficulties of music. For example, it does not like works from the Complete Works of Mozart. Certain other works, that were already scanned, work fine.

Here is a page from a well-known tuba work. (It's PD in my country, btw) I found the PDF online and scanned the whole document. I have not done any editing in Sibelius to this page whatsoever. However, I did manually add the key signatures, remove some extra beats and fix some easy mistakes in Photoscore. I have maybe spent 10 minutes editing this document, so far. The free version of Photscore does not consider articulations and most markings on the page. There are plenty of obvious mistakes, but most will be really easy to fix in Sibelius. The page order is screwed up...

[bill]

Please Look up MuseScore and play with it after reading the furnished manual. It is all on line and it is all FREE!

[ralphbsz]

Its owner, Avid, has sold off some product lines, but NOT SIBELIUS, and has farmed out programming of Sibelius to either Kiev or Southern California.

Kind of a big difference between Kiev and Southern California? One of the last companies to farm out development to the Ukraine was Reiser File System, and remember where that lead: Mr. Reiser met a nice lady from Kiev, married her, had a few kids, and then murdered her. OK, this paragraph is solely humor (although with a very dark and sad topic).

3. If the music you want to scan into Finale or Sibelius was typeset in Finale or Sibelius, then you stand a chance. Otherwise, forget it.
4. Even in the best case, you will spend more time cleaning up scanning errors than you would have spent entering the music into either program from scratch by hand.

I respectfully disagree. If you buy the full versions, and you buy the high-end version of the scanning software (which adds several hundred $ to the purchase price), then much music can be scanned in, and it is so close to correct that it only requires a little fixing up. I haven't tried full conductor's scores, percussion parts, strange notations (like tablature, georgian chant, free-rhythm music without bar lines, piano music with more than two systems), but normal piano, solo, or chamber music works well enough.

A lot depends on the quality of the scan. I've found 600 dpi gray scale to work reasonably (albeit very slowly).

5. DO NOT buy the cut-down versions of either program. You will eventually run into obstacles those "Child Programs" cannot handle.
6. Download a demo of each and see which matches your style.

There I completely agree. And they have pretty long learning curves (the method of entry is rather different), so use the demo version for a few weeks before committing.

[PMeuph]

Exactly. That would have taken me ten minuted to enter in Finale, in Simple Edit, which is the slow method. Scanning is still of little use because it takes just as long to fix the scan as it does to just type it in manually. And yes, I have done this with this specific work. It is not time consuming at all unless one simply refuses to learn to use the application properly.

I said "maybe" 10 minutes, and applied to the whole document. This is the first page, retrieved from the Airforce Bass Trombone Audition Package. Just opened and exported to Sibelius. Maximum time spent is 2 minutes including the time to open both software applications. No editing whatsoever...

What I was disagreeing with is your claim that this is a "dreadful quality" scan.

[PMeuph]

Scan in the first page of the score to any orchestral work. When you can do that and have it be accurate enough to not take an hour finding scan errors, call me. It is junk, only usable for *very* limited applications. It is useless for someone who does this for a living and needs accuracy and speed and the ability to scan in more than a single line part.

The first page to the Dover version of Firebird would scan perfectly. (Most staves are empty, btw)

Furthermore, in ten minutes, my part will be publishable. Yours is not. It is quite basic and not acceptable for publication. In ten minutes mine will be perfect and ready for the customer. Manually entered. Every time. Sorry. You fail to convince with your simple demo. Scan in a page or two from Stravinsky's Firebird or something else like that. It cannot do this.

I could clean this part up in 10 minutes...The second print screen is an absolutely UNEDITED version. Absolutely no effort on my part, I just let the computer do it and then I took a screenshot.

Argue all you want. It will not change the quality of the OCR reading using actual, engraved music and not something from a computer. It will not change the inability of the application to scan in scores. It is, at best, quite limited.

The problem sometimes with Tubenet is the desire to answer another question but the one at hand. You have 15 years of experience type-setting and arranging and admit to being a professional. That is all fine and I respect that, but I don't believe that is remotely close to what the OP's "a little arranging for concert band" is going after, right? While the OCR stuff might not be perfect, (except when taking a score that was made in Sibelius, where it is great), it's a tool that can be learned and has improved drastically in past years. If I can put my hands on the full version of Photoscore, I will post an example of an orchestral score.

[Highpitch]

My thanks to everyone who replied. I now know a lot more than I did, the rest is up to me & my PC.

DDG

[eupher61]

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater

[pgym]

All well and good, but Sibelius is not being discontinued.

At least not immediately.

Sibelius just released a point update to 7.1.3.

An update that was produced entirely by the recently-laid-off London programming team prior to Avid's announcement that they were closing the London office and laying off the entire programming and customer support teams and outsourcing possible future development and support to California or Kiev.

Dont believe anything you hear on "Save Sibelius" or TubeNet.

Including, presumably, opinions of business professors proclaiming that all is well in Sibeliusland?

[ken k]

wow! a company actually outsourcing to America? that's a switch!

k