Steve,

I now use Sibelius for our School lab. Previously I have taught in school labs using Finale. I find Sibelius much more intuitive and straight forward. Students catch on right away. I’ve shown students the basic note entry at the beginning of a 90 minute period, and come back at the end of class to find that they not only entered all the notes, but also added text, articulation, and dynamics. The help documentation is also excellent.

Finale uses ‘tools’ that require a learning curve and pose certain problems. For example, you can create the same symbol in several different tools, making it difficult to access that symbol if you don’t remember how you created it. In Sibelius, anything on the screen can be clicked to edit.

Finale also has 3 different ‘views’. Sibelius only uses one view. It is so much easier.

Sibelius support has been very helpful. Our lab had several dying computers, and tech support made it very easy to change the registration to new computers as I was able to acquire them.

Finale has three advantages that I need, so I keep one personal copy available. These advantages do not apply to a student lab. First- Finale integrates with Smart Music, published by same company. If a piece is not in the Smart Music Library, you can add it if you have it entered in Finale. As a choir director, I use many scores from the Choral Public Domain Library. These are in any number of programs: Finale, Sibelius, Noteworthy Composer, Encore, etc. Finale is pretty good at converting other files into Finale files, as long at the version of the target is older than the Finale version being used.

The second advantage of Finale is that Finale is more versatile in exporting audio files- you can specify certain measures, save to wave or mp3, etc. Sibelius is limited in this process. As I make practice sound files for students, I have to convert files to Finale and then make the sound files- it is just easiest this way for me.

Finally, I find Finale easier for making worksheets. The page layout, while more complicated, is a bit more versatile- especially if you have cut-out scores, different sized staves all over the place, things like that. I will explore Sibelius more this summer for this type of thing, because honestly, I manipulate Finale a lot to get the layout effects that I use in worksheets, and it isn’t ideal.

Again, these advantages of Finale really apply to the teacher, not the student. For a lab, I would go with Sibelius without hesitation.

Jeff Morton
Choir and Music Theory
Homestead High School
Cupertino CA