Hi guys,
Adrian, what a beautiful piece! It's really helpful to hear it with the instruments that you intended for it.
What you're doing with the various software applications you have is pretty much what they are each best at. Notation Composer is designed as a compositional assistant, and we've got even more goodies that will help that process in the next release. Composer's scoring is good enough for most uses, but if you want a really finely polished score, then Sibelius or Finale are the best choices. Sibelius is a dedicated score engraving application, for final "pro" polishing and does that well. Cubase is a great sequencer and can host VSTis (which we plan to do on down the line) and you can therefore get a great audio recording of your work.
If you don't want or need the final polish of Sibelius, Composer will work fine. If you have VSTis that you want to use but don't want to purchase Cubase, you can use a free application like VST Host and some virtual MIDI cables as
explained here (the details are for Aria, but you could substitute VST Host) to play the instruments using Composer. You can then record the performance using any of a number of audio apps (even Windows Audio Recorder) to get an audio file.
There are lots of different ways to make lots of music. And they're good
It's mostly a matter of your budget and what applications have the features you want and the ease of use you want.
Adrian, thanks for sharing about
www.box.net. I've
re-posted that here as well.
ttfn,
Sherry