Finale AND Dorico (maybe MuseScore, Notion Sibelius, etc. also)

[PeterF]

Encore has been superseded by Overture, which is Don William's new evolution of his work. I tried it once and the slurs were hideous, for starters. Given the difficulty of the task, there are a surprising number of notation products out there, all fighting for a tiny fraction of a niche market. NoteAbility Pro is another (Mac only) that's been going since the early 90s, written by a one-man shop.

It's hard for anyone to compete against MuseScore, which is already widespread in education (because it suits the budget of both faculty and student). It has limitations, but -- like Finale -- if you know what good results should look like, then you can get a long way. It is also being developed fruitfully, with a current focus on engraving quality and playback.

Against that, any paid-for app has to justify its price; and for commercial work, that means speed. One of Dorico's main attractions is being able to knock out finished scores and parts quickly.

Never heard of Overture. I wonder why they still have a page selling the old Encore?
https://www.passportmusic.com/products/encore/

Never heard of NoteAbility. I see it's from some professor at UBC in Canada. I only have a PC but an iPhone. No iPad but a Surface Pro.

I actually started with EZ-Score Plus on the Atari STFM 1040 computer in late 1989, then moved to the German Score Perfect Professional (now defunct) in the early 1990s and helped edit their manual from German in English. I moved to the PC around 1994 and Finale a little while later. I will investigate MuseScore as well for my ukulele tutorials. I just downloaded Muse Score. It can handle ukulele tab, uke fretboards (not quite out of the box), but it can handle the basics. I will get back to Dorico.

Thanks for the info.

[PeterF]

Just been delving into Dorico for ukulele melody and TAB purposes. BTW, I like the interface. The Berlin wall Steinberger set-up though is daunting. What can't go wrong??? LOL Jedenfalls geht es! Anyways... it's working. BTW - I speak a lot German despite being from Canada. I love Lieder. Of course I speak fluent French.

I noticed Dorico has the same thing as MuseScore about adding "linked staves" when it comes to (guitar/ukulele) TAB or fretted instruments. I rather like it cause it inputs the TAB fret position number on the TAB when you put it in as notes in the treble clef staff above. ScoreMuse and Dorico do that but Finale and Sibelius don't as far I have seen. Interesting.

Fretboards are new in Dorico's latest machination of 3.5. I haven't tested them yet. I assume they did it well for now. They include the ukulele as instrument and it works.

I do like the MIDI sequencer in Dorico though I have found no way yet (or asked on the Dorico forum) where to find how to change the other MIDI controller numbers.

It's looking nice. I am curious about the SE version for what I want to do.

Pete

[MikeHalloran]

I noticed online that "Encore" is still for sale. Does anyone still use it? I remember trying to decide between Encore and Finale back in 1996... I chose Finale.

Encore has been superseded by Overture, which is Don William's new evolution of his work. I tried it once and the slurs were hideous, for starters. Given the difficulty of the task, there are a surprising number of notation products out there, all fighting for a tiny fraction of a niche market. NoteAbility Pro is another (Mac only) that's been going since the early 90s, written by a one-man shop.

It's hard for anyone to compete against MuseScore, which is already widespread in education (because it suits the budget of both faculty and student). It has limitations, but -- like Finale -- if you know what good results should look like, then you can get a long way. It is also being developed fruitfully, with a current focus on engraving quality and playback.

Against that, any paid-for app has to justify its price; and for commercial work, that means speed. One of Dorico's main attractions is being able to knock out finished scores and parts quickly.

An FYI:

I just got off the phone with Don Williams, Encore's original developer and owner/developer of SonicScores/Overture—he and I have been in touch for awhile. He has completed the purchase of all code and IP of PassportDesigns and will soon re-launch the passportdesigns.com web site.

It appears that Encore is going to be raised from the dead. Plans include 64 bit for Mac/Win, MusicXML 3.0 import/export, multiple undo and possibly a few other features. The immediate goal is to get it working and reading older files so that longtime users can access them and export if desired. Other than that, no rewrite is being planned.

At the moment, I have no other details nor do I have a timeline.

[Bill Reed]

I wish he'd get the Overture update out first. We've been waiting for a LONG time

[MikeHalloran]

I wish he'd get the Overture update out first. We've been waiting for a LONG time

We don't talk about that. I have a license for Overture, too. One of the possibilities is that Overture may be updated to open Encore files instead.

[Bill Reed]

Sort of the elephant in the room...

[dtoub]

I've never actually used Dorico but have certainly followed it from afar (and I've certainly seen your posts on the Dorico forum, Michael RE). One thing I do wish Finale had that Dorico does very well is accidental management. The accidental plug-in in Finale is much more limited and while I've used a combination of JW Accidentals and TGTools accidentals to fix things, both have limitations. JW Accidentals, as I've mentioned a lot of times, crashes on my Mac if I change anything from the default profile. So there's that.

I also suspect that Dorico is much better at page layout and avoiding collisions; I had to invest in Perfect Layout, which brought its own challenges but was much better than the default methods of layout in Finale.

But I also think that for me, I like the fact that Finale doesn't make me do things its way exclusively; Finale overall is pretty flexible and can handle nearly anything I've thrown at it since the early 90's, including my old complex 12-tone scores and my longstanding minimalist stuff. Finale does throw up some issues most of the time, but the plugins certainly help immensely. Were I to be much younger and have less invested in Finale (which I've used since the early 90's when there was just v. 3.2 on the Mac), I'd likely be using Dorico. Why? Because it seems to have much more momentum. Yes, Finale can handle nearly everything, but not always well. And useful updates are not very common anymore. Dorico still is adding some features, but most of the functionality I've seen within Dorico would allow it to do the vast majority of what Finale does. Yeah, Dorico isn't as nice with regard to cutout scores, but I've only recently tried that in Finale with my own compositions and don't really use it. In other words, if that's the one advantage Finale has, it's pretty minor. I also like that Dorico has a very responsive forum; it seems very focused on meeting the needs of its users. Finale is older, long established and I hope not content to rest on its many laurels. Finale 3.2.1 was a very elegant notation program, and I even wrote a business school paper on it years ago as one reflection of how well it was put together and how useful it was at the time. I still would not switch, but that's because at this point all my scores are in Finale and given my day job, I don't have time to compose let alone transition to a new notation program after 30 years or so.

[motet]

What is TG Tools Accidentals supposed to do? I see bizarre things like "put sharps/flats on all notes at the beginning of each staff system." Is that for some pedagogical use?

I tried to use JW Accidentals to create cautionary accidentals but found it so verbose with false positives and to not be useful. It (ans in fact other JW plug-ins) also has trouble with independent time signatures, which I use for key-signatureless Horn in F and Timpani (the Finale keysignatureless feature has problems). The only think I found useful from JW Accidentals was inserting a cautionary on an accidental tied over a system break. But perhaps I'm not understanding either plug-in's full potential.

The Finale Cautionary Accidentals plug-in seems to work OK for that if you pick the right options--that is, it will add a cautionary to cancel a previous accidental within the last 2 bars (the "2" value is settable).

[dtoub]

What is TG Tools Accidentals supposed to do? I see bizarre things like "put sharps/flats on all notes at the beginning of each staff system." Is that for some pedagogical use?

I tried to use JW Accidentals to create cautionary accidentals but found it so verbose with false positives and to not be useful. It (ans in fact other JW plug-ins) also has trouble with independent time signatures, which I use for key-signatureless Horn in F and Timpani (the Finale keysignatureless feature has problems). The only think I found useful from JW Accidentals was inserting a cautionary on an accidental tied over a system break. But perhaps I'm not understanding either plug-in's full potential.

The Finale Cautionary Accidentals plug-in seems to work OK for that if you pick the right options--that is, it will add a cautionary to cancel a previous accidental within the last 2 bars (the "2" value is settable).

Yeah, there are some odd options in TGTools, and not just the accidentals plugin (it's rare nowadays that I find any use for it, and it's always been somewhat confusing, overpriced IMHO and focused on what I think is a very narrow bunch of use cases). The only major thing I use TGTools' accidentals plugin is to clean up after JW Accidentals putting occasional cautionary accidentals where they don't belong. The issue for me with JW Accidentals is that it crashes every time I change the default settings. So I can't customize it at all. This is the Mac version.

TBH, most plugins seem to have very little documentation. They try, but don't really succeed in that regard. The best documentation I've found is for the Patterson plugins, and that set is frequently updated and well maintained. TGTools is kinda/sorta maintained, and JW continues to be AWOL. Of the three, I use JW the most, then Patterson then TGTools.