Yes, wasabi peas are quite tasty (although they have the marked side effect of making it impossible for my wife to be within two rooms of me or them).  I am a bit concerned about that "Kasugai Peas & You", though.  Who is this "You"?  And why is he or she in a bag of peas?  is it Aaron that's in the bag of peas?   

Ups: a series of controlled and rather pleasurable (indeed sometimes euphoria-inducing) explosions in the sinus area, especially when consumed by the handful.

Downs: well, no one has to share my personal space so I think I'm in the clear. (You may well say, Ollie, the night is but young! Alas, Ollie isn't. )

Thanks for that heads-up, Ron. Does that apply to current Sib 3 users? 

Sorry, no, martle. Only to those who already have shelled out for 5.0.


The Mac update is much smaller than that for Windows, which surprises me, since contrary to expectations, 5's been running far better on my PC than my Mac.

The latest update, 5.2 is with us now, and appears on early testing to show decided improvements in stability as well as the loading of complex material over the previous versions, particularly when used with complicated sound files. Still feel that it's a pity that it couldn't have been held back and released in this more stable form, rather than being rushed out in its original all-but-beta state.

IIRC martle and hh are both Sibelius users and Reiner a Finale man, whilst the Antipodean hooner uses both, so it's pretty obvious who you should speak to first. As far as the actual production goes, I still find that writing into a rough score is the fastest: these programmes all seem to look good immediately, but the tidying up and dealing with all the extras can be a pretty time-consuming slog. On the other hand, the ease of producing parts (no more staying up all night desperately trying to get them done in time) and revising sections is a wonderful advantage.

 I don't regret buying Sibelius all those years ago: it would have been all but impossible for me to have produced my biggest score without it, and if you're having it handed to you on a silver plate, well.....

He of course is quite closely acquainted with the music too, but I suppose he's sleeping now.   I dare say we'll have the pleasure of his company in a few hours' time though. My last orchestral score and parts were done beautifully by the excellent Messrs Wolff and Okrzeja of Notengrafik Berlin (here is a page from it, I'm sure I must have posted this before, never mind) using Score, which unbelievably runs only under MS-DOS. I suppose that for the cost of Finale or Sibelius I could buy Score and a second-hand computer to run it on but that would seem a highly inelegant solution. The results look good but the process of entering the information is very laborious and complicated from what I've seen.