In 2003 I decided I would no longer buy upgrades to Finale, the music notation software program I’d been using for years, until they fixed certain basic notational problems and bugs. This is a notation program, after all (so my argument goes), and they need to make the notation functions work correctly, and stop adding in all these ridiculous features designed to help undergraduates get out of doing their style-studies homework, e.g., "Enter a Melody and I’ll Harmonize it in the Style of [PICK ONE: BACH, MAHLER, STRAVINSKY, WOURINEN]". And so I’ve been using Finale 2002 for over three years now, dealing with the bugs and problems, finding my own creative work-arounds.

Last year I finally relented, after much coaxing and cajoling and Chinese water torture from my friends, and purchased a copy of Finale’s main competitor, Sibelius 3. These friends assured me that I would love it: it is SO much easier than Finale, there is MUCH less work involved in getting to a finished product. And these things are true about Sibelius. The problem is that the finished product is esthetically deplorable and patently wrong.

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Future Enhancement, Eventually... perhaps

YIKES!
(click here for a
close-up of the keyboard)

In the late 70s and early 80s I worked as a music engraver, actually apprenticing with an old master. We used the MusicWriter — a big Olympia typewriter that had been rebuilt with musical symbols, and that used those carbon ribbons for the old IBM Selectric typewriters. These gave nice clean, sharp impressions on the paper. And when we were doing projects for major publishers, we also drew all that paper ourselves, each page with a unique layout, and we drew the slurs, ties, hairpins, and beams, all with ink. Even later when I returned to mostly hand-copying my own work — the engraving was simply too time-consuming — my eye had become so critical that I used a calculator to figure out how many millimeters I could assign to each beat on a given line.

Music engraving used to be an art form in itself, and I spent a lot of years learning it. It used to matter that your scores looked professional, that your layout was not just correct but thoughtful, easy on the eye. I understand that many users of music notation software today are probably people working in commercial or popular music who need the output to be accurate and readable and not much more. But it saddens me that the designers of these programs have completely thrown the art, the craft of music engraving overboard. I miss those things.

I’ll admit that I’m probably ruined for anything other than “perfection” (whatever that means in this context), so am rarely satisfied. In the case of Sibelius, I’d settle for adequacy. But even the most basic notational needs often go unfulfilled in this program. Whenever I post a question to the Sibelius online users’ forum — which I inevitably begin with “I’m sure it must be possible to do this, I just can’t seem to find it in the documentation…” — the response is invariably “No, that isn’t possible, at least not yet. It is on our list for future enhancement.”

That’s nice. But when you consider that there has been no new release of Sibelius in almost two years, and the technical staff in the online forum has no information as to when a new version might be forthcoming, it doesn’t bode well. (Inexplicably, Sibelius users even brag about this approach, claiming it is preferable to Finale’s annual upgrades.)

[NOTE: Sibelius 4 has since been released. — jc]

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Clunky and Inappropriate

So: Sibelius is a music notation program that retails for $600, and...

• 

  Don’t like the fact that the opening of the shorter hairpin is smaller than the longer one? Gee, that’s too bad.

  won’t let you adjust the opening of an individual hairpin, an adjustment that arguably wouldn’t be necessary if the program drew hairpins correctly in the first place. You can set global preferences (not default preferences) for the “large” and “small” openings of hairpins. But changing these values creates terrible problems with hairpins that break at the end of a system or page. When I explained in the Sibelius online users’ forum how I felt such hairpins should display, I was told to draw them with two straight lines, angled so as to look the way I wanted. When a music notation program forces you to employ such Rube Goldberg “work-arounds” for as basic an element as a hairpin, you can bet there are some pretty serious design flaws at play.

• 

  Cool! But wrong.

  draws slurs arched up so high and broad they invariably crash into other parts or objects. You’re allowed only minimal control over fixing this and other problems — and outright bugs that have by all accounts been around since the program’s inception — with the shape of slurs. And this fixing must be done manually, instance by instance, with the mouse.

• decides on its own when the leading or ending tip of a slur belongs outside an articulation and when it belongs inside. If you disagree with Sibelius' decision, you'll have to recreate your articulation as a “symbol” — which requires digging through a dialog box containing dozens of symbols — and then you can place it wherever you please. (Those who use Sibelius for playback, however, will be dismayed to discover that symbols do not affect playback as articulations do, so “symbol” staccati, accents, etc., are ignored.)

• 

  If you feel (as I do) that the accent for a gesture of this type should be outside (i.e. above) the slur while the staccato dots are inside, don’t expect to simply drag the accent by itself — the staccato dot will be coming with it. You’ll have to recreate the accent as a symbol.

  decides on its own in what order (vertically speaking) articulations appear when there are multiple articulations on a given note, and this order cannot be modified. The only solution is again to create the articulations as “symbols.”

• binds articulations to one another when there are multiple articulations attached to a single note, so trying to drag an accent up or down a bit is going to take the staccato dot, for example, right along with it, when you might have been perfectly happy to leave the staccato dot where it was. The only solution is... well, if you’re starting to suspect you’ll be spending a lot of time in that “symbols” dialog box, you’ve got the picture.

• 

  Nightmarish
  (click the image for detail)

  uses a horizontal-spacing algorithm that produces a kind of nightmarish version of Finale’s “note spacing” (which is already bad enough), and provides no equivalent to Finale’s “beat spacing.” Sibelius does allow you to change the number of spaces that a given rhythmic value will receive, and to set minimums. But these values map into Sibelius’ algorithm in very clunky, inappropriate ways, and ultimately you’ll have to drag notes manually in any given measure to create proper beat spacing, but that will create other problems. Click the image on the right for an example and more details.

Beyond this, the complaints I have — and there are lots of them — become increasingly detailed and frankly time and patience fail me. Suffice it to say that anyone who writes music that includes rhythms, dynamics, slurs and articulations is going to be left wondering how on earth the creators of this program ever came up with a price of $600.

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Brain Damage

When using Sibelius I just can’t escape that “Music Engraving for Dummies” feeling. Start reading the user’s manual, for which you’ll pay an additional $30, and the condescending tone pretty much clinches it: they think we’re stupid. To wit, from page 266 of the Sibelius user’s manual, Changing transpositions of transposing instruments:

You can create a transposition change at the start of the score... and you can also change transposition mid-score — useful for doubling instruments such as Clarinet in A/B-flat, Tenor/Alto Saxophone or (if you live in the nineteenth century) Horn with crooks...

In non-transposing score: here we descend into profound subtleties that you will almost certainly never need to understand, so please feel free to leave this option well alone... This option is required only for instruments such as piccolo, double bass and tenor voice, which are customarily notated an octave out even in non-transposing scores...

However (takes big breath): if you do use this option... and if you want to give that instrument a clef with a little 8 or 15 on, bear in mind that Sibelius deliberately ignores the little 8 or 15 because it is optional...

Warning: use of this option carries a high risk of brain damage.

When I pay $30 for a user’s manual, I expect nuts-and-bolts information about using the software, not breezy prose, assumptions that I’m too dim-witted to understand the notion of octave transposition, and embarrassing attempts at humor. And the entire quote above comes from a single page of a 589-page-long manual. Imagine slogging through page after page of this while trying to figure out how to adjust the opening of a hairpin — only to go later to the online users’ forum and find out that you can’t — and you’ll get my frustration. I wonder if they offer a $15 version of the manual without all the piffle? It would almost certainly be half as long.

Sadly, I know from having worked in software development myself for many years now that this is a common attitude toward design and technical writing (i.e. the writing of user’s manuals): assume the worst about your end user, and dumb-it-down from there.

[NOTE: See Daniel Spreadbury's comments regarding the price of the user's manual at the bottom of this page.]

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Beguiled

YIKES!

The grievance you most often hear from those who have deserted Finale in favor of Sibelius is that Finale is too complicated, it has too many menus, too many tools, too many palettes. Those who argue that Sibelius is superior have been beguiled by a simple, elegantly-designed user interface (although it has some serious problems of its own), as if ease-of-use were the reason to buy a $600 software program. By that logic, Microsoft should bundle MS Word for free with Windows and charge us $600 for Notepad.

One little question: when was proper music notation ever easy? Finale’s designers have indeed made choices in the user interface that sometimes leave me shaking my head. But where the complaint about Finale’s ever-deepening menu systems goes astray is that Finale is complicated because music notation is complicated. What do I care how easy Sibelius is to use if what comes out of my printer at the end of the day is wrong? I hope Sibelius’ users wake up to this at some point and start demanding improvements, but I doubt that will happen. Most of the “wish-list” items you see on the Sibelius forum have to do with making the interface even easier to use. So I’ve got this sickening feeling that in the long term Sibelius’ shoddy output will become so much the norm that everyone will start thinking it’s right. (Consider that one of the friends who had recommended Sibelius recently complained that Finale’s slurs are “too flat” — then look at the example above of Sibelius’ slurs, and you’ll get my point.)

There are those in both Sibelius’ and Finale’s online users’ forums who are understandably weary of the squabble between the two camps, and dismiss it as a pointless debate over British versus American esthetics. If I were British I would certainly recoil from that perspective where Sibelius is concerned.

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The Bottom Line

Sibelius is that knock-out bombshell in a tight dress who can’t spell “hairpin” and still talks down to you — but who cares: she’s easy. It might one day become a quality notation program, providing the control and tools needed to create professional-quality scores. And when that day comes, Sibelius will have morphed into the same bloated frump in a housedress that Finale has become, with just as many menus, tools and palettes.

Sibelius’ relative ease-of-use comes at an enormous cost in terms of quality of output. At least with Finale I know I’ll be able to get to a professional-looking finished product. With Sibelius, in its current state, that’s out of the question.

So, there will be much pulling-of-hair and gnashing-of-teeth, but it’s back to Finale for me.

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An afterthought

Fancy... but how do I draw a slur?

In fairness to the makers of both Sibelius and Finale, they face an enormous obstacle in designing a user interface: the computer keyboard. This device is really nothing more than a modern-day typewriter, and was never designed for the entry of music. This is why these programs have so many menus, tools and palettes: these are the only means of providing the extended functionality needed to manipulate musical symbols.

In the early 80s MIDI promised so much with regards to musical data entry: one day, we were told, you'll be able to play your music directly into the computer from your synthesizer or even a microphone, and the finished score will magically appear. Twenty-five years later we're still waiting on that one.

What we really need is an entirely new kind of interface, one in which we return to the old-fashioned way of creating a musical score: by hand. A touch-sensitive screen of some kind would be needed, which would then take our scratchings and turn them into an engraved score. In my little fantasy, software provided with the device could then save the score in whatever format you wish for final editing: Sibelius, Finale, or whatever else comes along in the meantime. Such a device would certainly go a long way toward making these notation programs both user- and output-friendly.