Still struggling, though about to call it a night: looks as if the Mac side may now be sorted....fingers crossed.

Well as I said either somewhere above in this thread or maybe in a PM to Ollie, I was enormously embarrassed when Finale released 2006.  I had been beta testing for them for awhile, and they released the software at least 6 mo. b/f it was actually ready.  I've been a loyal Finale customer since '94, and it's really appalling to me that they keep putting out new versions every year w/o really doing sufficient testing.  Even w/ the various updates, they never quite get to the point that the software is reliable.  By the time they'd released 2006c, they were already well underway in the alpha testing of 2007.

Horrendous.

I think part of their business model is relying on the $$ from the annual upgrades.  That's pure speculation, but I can't think of another reason they keep releasing software annually, rather than spending 2-3 yrs putting together a really good product.


To be fair, the big companies (Microsoft, obviously, but also some of the other biggies) have been beta testing on paying customers for a decade, too.

If the software is being used primarily for producing legible scores, then I'd agree with you, martle. However, for those of us who know that the likelihood of hearing anything but our work for the smallest forces being performed live is minimal, then the extra 'bells and whistles' - in this case access to reliable libraries of excellent sample banks working direct from the scores -  is rather more than a mere upgrade. 4 was a big improvement over 3 in this respect ( and produced a score for a charity's video which fooled virtually everyone) and as I finally and groggily fired up a current project in the early hours of the morning it became clear that once the patches and updates to a slew of ancilliary equipment had been performed (advice concerning which was nowhere to be found in the Sibelius 635 page documentation) it became very obvious that 5, once one can sort out the wrinkles, is light years further ahead. Sibelius is starting to find a fair amount of use in the entertainment industry as a notation-based sequencer: whether it's necessarily a good thing or no, 5 takes that side of its performance to an appreciably higher level than ever before...

Probably not for you, martle, you're right.

Are you planning to install the full Garnett Personal Orchestra?

Latest is that I've had to strip out not only the whole Sibelius installation but everything else associated with it, all the sound libraries and much else besides, right down to their registry entries, which was pretty hairy. On the plus side, the PC is now running Sibelius and GPO quite nicely: on the minus side, it's now interfering with the programme I use for recording, so unless I can get that back in the next few minutes I'll have to rewire the FM Tuner across to the Mac for tonight's Prom. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Separated at birth?

I've been extremely patient and never yelled once nor chucked anything, especially considering that it's been a glorious day here and the cameras were begging to be taken out. Not everything's sorted yet by a long chalk, but that's another story....

Moldy peas?  Is that some sort of Australian delicacy?