I believe that in recent years they've started to bring in people who understand the field but I do not believe anything big has happened from Sibelius in a long time.īy the way, the developers they fired went on to create Dorico.ĭorico: New, being actively developed. About 10 years ago it fired its entire development staff and replaced them with programmers who had no experience with sheet music. Since it is not under active development (apparently), it feels like a sinking ship. And as the years went on, it caught up in terms of features and power.Īt the same time, it is starting to run into the same problem I mentioned above with Finale though perhaps not quite as bad. It is not as old as Finale and when it was being developed, they took care to improve upon the experience making, arguable, a better user experience than you find in Finale. Old people don't like to switch tools unless they have to. That said, it is still widely used in academia but mainly among older professors. Consensus seems to be that Finale is too old and since it does not appear to be under active development, it's hard to recommend it these days. There's always a fine line between being too old and needing to start over and being old enough to be powerful enough. Old program often have features that no one else has, but they also often have code bases that are so hacked together that it is difficult to improve upon them.

Commercialįinale: Old, semi-active development. If you are more technically-minded then LilyPond might be the best one for you. It, along with Dorico, produces the best looking scores by default without the need for a lot of tweaking. However, LilyPond also is the most powerful and flexible program in this list.

For this reason it scares off a lot of people. Instead, you type your notes into a text file which LilyPond then compiles into a pdf. LilyPond does not use a graphical interface like all the other ones. The future is extremely bright for MuseScore. It's probably the least powerful of all the ones in this list but it is under very active development and it improves all the time. MuseScore is extremely popular these days especially for students and people just starting out and that's because it's free and is very good. MuseScore: New, under active development. Each has quirks, shortcomings and strengths. They are all powerful enough for most people. There are five reasonable programs you can go with.

Download dorico crossgrade sibelius