Not much talk about Sibelius

[benwiggy]

Finale and Dorico are frequently discussed on this site -- their pros and cons, capabilities and failings -- (and also those of MuseScore); but not much is said about Sibelius.

Supposedly the notation app with the largest user base: is anyone here using it as their first choice app? What are its shortcomings and its advantages?

Just idle curiosity -- I've never actually used it, myself.

[RMK]

Boosey (or rather, Philip Rothman) is using it to engrave their new Copland critical editions among other projects.

Peer uses it for some of their Ives critical editions (at least for the songs).

Sibelius used to be my first choice app until Dorico version 3 appeared. I don't know that it is any worse than Dorico, just a different workflow.

[Fred G. Unn]

I've periodically done Sib work, and currently have it installed, but I've never felt comfortable with it, and it always takes me a few days to remember all the shortcuts and get back up to speed. There's one composer that still sometimes sends me Sib stuff that I just export and work on in Dorico. I keep it around for a couple of students too, although most now are on MuseScore. The last big orchestral job I did with Sib that I oversaw was back in 2013 for Modern Works Publishing. At least for a while I know Schirmer was using it too after they phased out SCORE. Not sure what they are on now. In the aughts I worked on a few big jobs in Sib for Schirmer as part of a team, but I never ran the project, and was just working for a really great editor. (She trained me on SCORE in the 90s) In 2012 I did a big job on Sib with a couple of others for NYC Boosey that ended up being a bit of a story. (Can't really repeat it but it involved a ghost writing attribution, forged contract, internal dating relationship, and lots of drama that blew up later)

[John Ruggero]

I dabbled with Sibelius for a short while, around the time Notat.io started, just to see what it was like. My impression was that it was similar to Finale, but did not offer as much control over small engraving details.(Maybe that changed in later versions.) So I returned to Finale.

[JJP]

I’ve used Sibelius from time time, however, I still come back to Finale. With Finale I know that if there is some low-level tweak I want, I can find a way to do it. I’ve known a few other copyists in Los Angeles who started using Sibelius but eventually moved to Finale for similar reasons.

That said, there are a number of people I know who still use Sibelius as their primary tool. However, with studio recordings, most people seem to use whatever format the score is delivered.

Our team doesn’t do that and will convert to Finale because we genuinely care about the look of the final output and our template is in Finale… because we could tweak it to look the way we like!

[NeeraWM]

I started in Finale back in 2003, at a hobbyist level.
In 2008 I switched to Sibelius as my main driver and never looked back... until last year (more on this below).
From 2011 I used it professionally to create highly complex contemporary scores (had the luck of being personal copyist of a single composer for 12 years, you know, those old-style things!). Its main advantage? Speed. It's a very lightweight software up to a certain number of total staves (that is visible+invisible), I would say 60 staves. It still uses only one CPU core, so it may not take any of the advantages of modern CPUs. It is also very flexible, and, while being utterly full of bugs, it (almost) always lets you find a workaround. I've heard it is the main program used in film music, but I don't have first hand experience with that. I believe it is the fastest tool for arranging and creating decent-looking scores with the least effort without massive plug-in usage. Now, if you need to go beyond 80% level, user-skill and other software's features may change the balance.
There are some very awkward and badly-designed features such as the symbol/line editors, note spacing in cramped conditions is just miserable regardless of settings, etc. ... if you have specific questions about certain areas of notation and how they are handles by Sibelius, I will gladly elaborate!

Its note-spacing limitations, and my unheard pleas on public forums, have brought me to challenge myself to get to the same level in Dorico during 2022, which was quite brilliantly achieved, I can say. Now, while alphanumeric note-input is faster in Sib than in Dorico, Dorico's note-input always manages to put me in some sort of trance where I jump on the keys like a happy fairy :-D
One day I will try the same challenge with Finale, I feel I miss that level of control!

To conclude, Sibelius reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Mr Burns is shown how curing even one of his diseases would kill him, and that now they are just blocking the door all together.

[Fred G. Unn]

I gave Sibelius a try in earnest probably around 2002. (Sib 3 maybe?) The Sib marketing team was really crushing Finale's marketing around that time, painting Finale as obtuse and difficult to use, and Sib as fun and easy to use. Lots of musicians I knew were jumping over to Sib.

In all honesty, I hated it. This was before Panorama view, which is like Galley in Dorico or Scroll in Finale, so you could only work in Page view, which I didn't like for composition. It also was only duration-first input, which is fine for copying jobs, but I think is terrible for composition. Worst of all, click-dragging was both the mechanism for making edits and the mechanism for navigating, which made Sib an effing proofreading nightmare, as you could screw up any detail at any point and not notice it. (All of the above have changed or have options of course now.) It wasn't nearly as flexible as Finale in terms of settings, and the "holier than thou" insistence of the Sib team when I contacted tech support that you didn't need these options as they knew what settings were best, I found very off-putting. Finale's defaults were pretty crummy then too (Petrucci-era Fin defaults were of course terrible), but at least you could customize everything.

A couple of years later, Sib came out with "Dynamic Parts" which changed the game. Finale was left playing catch-up with a major useful feature, and I'm not sure ever really recovered. Many people, including publishers, made the switch to Sib then.

[Fred G. Unn]

Sib still has a couple of wonky default settings that are obvious signs to me that the user is using the defaults. The default accidental placement I find to be poorly spaced and way too close to the preceding barline:



Back in the aughts I realized I thought there was something "off" about Sib's horizontal spacing, but couldn't quite figure it out. I then realized Sib doesn't use a fixed spacing ratio like Dorico's Note Spacing / Custom Spacing Ratio or Finale's Music Spacing / Spacing Widths / Scaling Factor, but instead uses something like what Finale used to call an Allotment Library and now is a Spacing Width Table. I'm pretty sure Sib's defaults here haven't changed in 20 years. If you analyze the ratio between note values, most of them are quite tight, much less than Dorico's default 1.41:1 (square root of 2) or Finale's default 1.618:1 (Fibonacci, golden ratio).



Check out the ratio between a quarter and a half though! What possible justification is there for giving a half so much more horizontal space? Obviously lots of factors are involved with calculating horizonal spacing, but Sib's spacing has always seemed noticeably odd to me, and I think these strange ratios are why.

[NeeraWM]

Thankfully, there is the Note Spacing plug-in, that allows any of the most desired ratios to be applied to the whole score by changing the defaults.