The Logic Off Topic list

On a fine day, 15-07-2003, bladderskate wrote:

>I know this may seem like it doesn't belong here, but please bear with me.

This is L-OT, isn't it, so anything belongs here :)

>I want to know how Logic Plat 5 (or later) users rate and/or compare
>the programs Sibelius and Finale for making quality prints of the
>music they make in Logic.  Any thoughts on this, to help me choose a
>notation program to go with Logic.  Looking for the most professional
>results and customizability (for mod music) with the least hassle in
>going between Logic and the notation app.

I'm by no means an expert.  Years ago I did some notation with Finale 
(version 3.something) and I've never even seen Sibelius. Still, any 
input is input, right?  So...

If you want a program that can do anything except make coffee, get 
Finale.  Want a 13-line stave (or is that staff?) with custom 
note-heads that have a user-defined MIDI-meaning?  Finale does it. 
Think up the most ridiculous requirement you could have, and Finale 
does it.
BUT... if you think Logic's learning curve is steep, you've never 
seen Finale.  Maybe it has been improved since I last used it, but 
Finale is the *only* piece of software that absolutely drove me up 
the wall (and I used a hell of a lot of different software packages 
over the years).  Change something: plough your way through at least 
3 dialogs (and often 5 or more).  And somehow I would always forget 
where option so-and-so was, so I got to taking notes of what I did 
and save those, so I could use my own notes as a reference in the 
future.  Completely utterly impossible interface.  It's very good 
though when it comes to stuff like extracting individual parts from 
orchestral scores and such.

Sibelius: no idea, never seen it. but I've heard some very good 
things about it. Probably less powerful than Finale (which still is 
the industry standard, I believe), but also more user-friendly I 
suppose.

Switching between Logic and some notation-app: what often amazes me 
is that people expect to be able to just play a piece loosely, and 
still get good notation out of it.  IMO that's impossible. You have 
to have 2 copies of a piece: one for notation purposes, and one for 
playing/recording.  And that's true regardless of the notation app 
you use (including Logic itself).
With Finale I used to make a hard-quantized version of a piece, 
export as midifile, and import in Finale.  That worked rather well. 
Most of the clean-up involved having to do enharmonic changes, but 
that's no big deal.  Of course such a version sounds horrible, but 
that's irrelevant (and also explains why I never used the MIDI 
functionality of Finale, and consider it irrelevant).  So the most 
important job in going from Logic to a notation-app is quantising 
both the note-start (easy) and note-length (cumbersome, 
unfortunately) in Logic.  After that at least Finale should give you 
a pretty decent score as a starting point.  Don't know about 
Sibelius, but I would expect its functionality to be similar.

Still, there's lots of work left after importing the midifile.  Often 
the spacing in a bar is way off (Finale stretching one bar across a 
full page line , while you want to fit 2 bars on that same line, 
etc).  That's where Finale becomes (or: became) cumbersome.  You can 
do it -- in fact, you can do anything in Finale -- but in my 
experience you have to have an extraordinary amount of patience and 
perseverance (or a bloody good memory for the zillion dialogs, or 
both).

Probably others have more recent experiences with either application 
and can share some really useful info.  Just thought I'd tell you 
about my past experiences, and my general thoughts about 
sequencer-to-notation work.

-- 
Hendrik Jan Veenstra   h @ k n o w a r e . n l
Omega Art: http://www.omega-art.com/