Daws with score editing as good or better than full version Sibelius or Finale?

[jonljacobi]

To the original question... No. Both those programs and others have all sorts of options the DAWs don't. Dorico is also impressive. That said, for just copyrighting etc., just about anything will do. As long as you can read the notation and it's accurate.

[fmr]

I guess that's because the users of one kind of program don't overlap that much with the users of the other kind. That's why notation programs also don't go so much into sequence editing and áudio editing (while they could).

Yup, not really worth devs time to make those dozen users happy, especially with music xml being pretty good these days.

There are massive long thread at Cockos forum wishing for notation in Reaper as well as at Cakewalk forum to improve for Sonar.

Anybody as serious as to actually register songs with a publisher to receive royalty as the music is used will have good use of notation.

I also used it to prepare a hired vocalist before arriving with some sheets on the song not to use my time practising. Both for lead and background vocals. And lyrics part is good too. My own performance on vocals is horrible, so some sheets are helpful preparing them.

At the time I played in bands, most songs were covers - and photo copies of score was provided as support for everybody to learn their part.

And I don't agree with there is no overlap in usage - notation software the last decade, all they did was duplicate what's in daws. That's basically all they did - and the cost for the products is really silly compared to what you get in daws - thereby interesting if daws perform well in the department.

Don't misunderstand me. I am one of those that love having notation (GOOD notation, not the kind of what is in SONAR) in the DAW. That said, I also love to have a really capable audio editor in DAW, and very few actually have something like that.

A really competent notation editor have to deal with pagination, number of staves per page, number of bars per stave, transposition instruments, all the myriad of articulation and expressiveness symbols, special note heads, polyphonic notation (with the handling of stem directions), a really good transcription algorithm (most of the times, the way DAWs transcribe music into notation really sucks), etc.

It's not just create a new editing window - it's like creating a new program within the program. Cubase and Logic are the ones that took it top a greater extent, but even there, it is far from being on pair with any of the notation editors available. It's closer, bot not CLOSE.

So, if it is to just have some kind of note display with editing capabilities, sure, if the transcription algorithm does a good job, I'm fine with that, but in no way will I consider that a replacement for Finale or Sibelius.

[jancivil]

I found Logic very easy to work with using notation, but I was not using it to compose. Cubase has a rather powerful set of tools but IME it is a nightmare to use and I'd never consider it.

The difference between creating music for playback, a musical, LIVE-seeming performance and what Finale, Sibelius do has to to with just how much information is just not in a score. Actual durations of notes, in anything you'll see in orchestra music, the score is shorthand for what musicians do. Accent markings are just generalities in comparison with what has to happen.

So if one is going to compose in Cubase, they're going to have to have hard-quantized music as your blueprint or beginning because Cubase is not really intelligent, it is machine-guessing based in rules and this centers in quantization. So a mix of triplet and duplet divisions of the time is enough so that all bets are off. If you hit Score Editor after performing in your music, it can be pretty useless if your music is working like live music does. I don't want to get too far into the weeds here but it creates a whole lot of ties which are not even reasonable, there's a ton or work before it's recognizable rhythmically, unless you're just doing really simple things and are a machine yourself. But you'll be creating the entire piece in the Score Editor with no care as to particular musicality in terms of timing, that's just what it is. That is not really something we want to listen to.

So there's a definite division of tasks, You create a score and then you create a performance. Your "performance" - IE: your piano roll editing - based in a score may well produce better guesses if you then go from piano roll to score, I don't actually know. But more or less everybody is going to have this division of jobs and we may as well use Finale or Sibelius for that job. And if it's a real printed score it absolutely has to be.

[jancivil]

Several years ago, Notion made piano-roll durations, blocks for notes you can stretch or shrink part of their program. Notion 4 I believe. There is no mention of it in the Notion 6 pages on their website.