notation v sibelius in schools

Forgive me for asking a really dumb question but I'm a IT person not a musician -what is the difference between notation and sibelius. We are a school that currently has sibelius and it seems to me sibelius is expensive and not very multiuser/hot desking friendly and for 11-16 year old is massive overkill.

If I installed notation what difference will my budding 11 year old musicians notice ?

Ta

Mal

[dj]

Hello, Mal:

I would think that, for school use, Notation products are the hands-down winner.

To start, for the price of one copy of Sibelius, you can get about 8 copies of Notation Composer.

The current Sibelius (version 5?) does have built-in sample playback, but Windows has a built-in system that would do very well for most school situations, so that isn't a great difference. The Sibelius playback engine is not that great, if I recall from a short test of the of demo.

I work with a professional arranger who uses Sibelius exclusively. For his purposes, there are probably advantages, but I can, with Composer, create printed notation that is so close to Sibelius' printouts that it makes no effective difference.

Sibelius does have some more advanced features: cross-staff beaming, cross-bar beaming, compound time signatures and so on. For 99% of school work, none of that is needed -- and things like cross-staff beaming are modern "shorthand", anyway, and should be avoided when teaching basics.

Sibelius is not (or at least was not) really geared toward live midi recording, while that has always been the strong point of Notation products. The quality of the transcription engine that Mark Walsen created was what brought me to Notation Software long before Notation Composer even existed.

There is an old tech rule of thumb: buy the product that can give you 80% of the function for 50% of the price. Notation software offers about 95% of the function for 20% of the price.

Hope that biased evaluation helps.

David

[mgj32]

Hi Mal,
Ditto to what David said. I would add that I am pretty sure I tried every notational program that existed several years ago, and my final choice was made between Composer and a French program whose advantage was that it had a plug-in with a number of voices that did text to singing, but presented problems of usage that Composer did not. I did try Sibelius, but found that with Composer I could get pretty much right to the music, so while Composer was intuitive the former required climbing a learning curve.

If you would like to browse through scores produced using Composer, you will find many in the Share Your Music section.

all best,
mgj