I fired up Sibelius this evening to work on transcribing an arrangement that I’ve been meaning to put down for the last year or so. I got a great deal on upgrading to Sibelius 5, I think it only ended up costing $100 or so. It’s much more user friendly than Finale. I actually can notate without feeling like I’m pulling teeth.
I did run into some problems trying to get my Yamaha Motif ES6 working correctly with the Sibelius MIDI playback. I don’t know how musicians do it in getting all this stuff up and running correctly between hardware and different software applications. I’m a tech guy, and I still run into issues that can leave me stumped. Actually, most of the problem is with the Yamaha Motif ES6. It’s a powerful machine, but the interface is as bad as Finale’s GUI. I need to spend some time and learn the features, but it seems ridiculous that I’ll need to spend 4 hours reading the manual just to learn the basics.