Klarinet Archive - Posting 000174.txt from 2002/08

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Is SmartMusic 7 compatible with Sibelius 2?
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 07:31:45 -0400

Thanks very much for the helpful replies. Bottom line: I'm glad I didn't let
the excellent salesman talk me into trying to pair Sibelius with SmartMusic
7.

Re. the usefulness of SmartMusic as a practice aid, Karl Krelove wrote,
> I found it kind of fun doing Brahms and Weber, but
>certainly not something to do as part of my regular
>practice activity.

Bill Hausmann wrote,
>>I have not (successfully) tried the program.
and described some problems students have had with setting up the program for
accompaniment in competitions.

Two other people who replied via private e-mail gave similar opinions. I
think I'd use this practice tool mainly for working on difficult passages,
and it sounds as though I can do that almost as well by using MIDI to input
Sibelius scores or fragments thereof to my electronic piano. In Sibelius,
it's easy to copy and paste, so I can write up a practice session where, for
instance, the piano repeats the same few measures over and over, with "first
bar for nothing" time clicks in between. The big convenience with SmartMove
would be that foot pedal to stop the music while I answer the phone, mess
with the reed or whatever, and I can live without that--the computer keyboard
is only a few steps away.

Also, the more I think about it, the more I can see SmartMove's flexible time
feature getting to be a crutch that might do me more harm than good. Since I
haven't played with real people for years, I'm forming bad habits of stopping
too often, skipping easy passages, not counting the rests, slowing down on
hard passages, etc.. If I start playing with my husband's group, I really
need to get back in the habit of "Follow the leader, even if he jumps out the
window," and I think I can do that better by working with an electronic
partner who *won't* slow down or speed up for me.

Re. compatibility with Sibelius, Karl Krelove wrote,
>The SmartMusic format is proprietary and you have
>to buy the accompaniments from Coda (now called
>MakeMusic!).

James Hobby wrote,
>>>According to CODA's website, you can write your own
>>>accompaniment using Finale 2003. I don't think Finale
>>>& Sibelius read each other's notation, so it would surprise
>>>me if SmartMusic did. (I could be wrong. My copy of
>>>Finale is several years old. <g.)

The trend is for greater compatibility, as happened with word processing.
Sibelius 2 can convert scores from MIDI, Finale and SCORE formats, but I
don't know whether it works the other way around. Over the last couple of
days, I tried writing out some accompaniments in Sibelius and sending them to
my electronic piano via MIDI. Since I can read this particular pianist's
mind ;-) , I don't have too much trouble following her, even though she won't
slow down or speed up for me! I think this solution will meet my needs
better than trying to kludge together Sibelius and SmartMusic when they
weren't really designed to work in sync.

I'm having a blast with Sibelius, by the way. Hope I don't sound like spam
here (ritual disclaimer: I don't work for Sibelius, don't know anybody who
works for Sibelius, etc. etc.), but this is an excellent program, IMHO. I
started out with the free demonstration disk (save function disabled), which
was complete enough to give me confidence that I could learn to use this
program instead of sitting there cussing it out! The demo was easy to try
out, but the purchased version turns out to be even easier to learn, thanks
to the first-rate manual. It's written for musicians, not for computer
experts. The program works similarly to a high-level word processor such as
Word or WordPerfect. There are a variety of different ways to do accomplish
tasks, and the level of complexity can vary enormously, according to needs
and preferences. My learning curve isn't nearly as steep as it has been with
most other computer programs.

Thanks again for helping me quit dithering!
Lelia
[AOL in the Washington, D.C. area still refuses to accept e-mail from Yahoo
users.]

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