I am staying at Roger’s and Daniel’s house right now, as my house has been unlivable for a few days at this particular stage of the remodeling process. So it is fun to be reading Roger’s blog entries while I hear him walking around upstairs.

About Sibelius vs. Finale, I actually think that Sibelius does look better on the printed page, though Finale has made great strides in catching up there. I just find Finale easier and faster for me to use, and more flexible. I will never forget how, using Sibelius, it took me about an hour to create expanding beams (through a painstaking and painful process called “nested triplets,” if I remember right), a process which literally would have taken about 10 seconds on Finale. Ugh!

In my composition class last year, the 12 of us in the room divided equally between Finale and Sibelius users. So it became a running joke that when a Sibelius user was projecting his/her score onscreen and having some trouble, the Finale people would say, “Well, if you only had Finale, that would be so easy to fix!” And when a Finale person had his/her score onscreen and had a problem, the Sibelius chorus would chant, “If you only had Sibelius…”