[mazelife]

I've stubbornly stayed on Sibelius 6 for years, but it no longer works on OS X Catalina, so I was pondering biting the bullet and upgrading to 8. But after seeing this...

Does anyone have any recommendations for a _real_ alternative they've used?* I took a look at MuseScore a couple of years ago and the impression I got was that it was fine for casual usage and for producing fairly simple scores, but lacked a lot of features. (I found that to be the case LillyPond as well.) Dorico looks more promising, but I'm curious what people who've used it heavily think.

I didn't even know that Finale was still around, but that was the first notation software I learned. Ironic that the reason Sibelius was able to trounce Finale in the marketplace so many years ago was mainly because the UI was so much easier to use and more intuitive. And now it's succumbed to the same problems.

*Features I'd like to see: parts generation, graphical score options, midi-based entry, and something that offers good default engraving behavior out-of-the-box but also lets you tweak everything to your liking. I typically sketch things out on on paper first, so I care less about "composition features" and more about being able to produce scores that are correct and that allow me to notate everything I would want.

[keehun]

With exception to graphical score options, Dorico is by far the best out there now. Especially for orchestral/band scores where one stave normally has multiple parts (2 flutes, etc), Dorico can handle that natively now.

Dorico has great out-of-the-box defaults and the people behind it genuinely care about great engraving.

Perhaps Dorico has better graphical score engraving by now, but it didn't when it came out. I personally don't have much use for that, so I haven't followed.

[dfan]

I used Sibelius for years and am happy to have switched to Dorico.