SOUNDING OFF

By David Hewson

The words “great”, “British” and “software” rarely fit together.

One exception is Sibelius, the music-notation program that started as the project of two brothers and now dominates the world of computer crotchets and quavers.

I’m a big fan of Sibelius. It is, for most professional musicians, teachers and students, the pinnacle of its specialist art -- one reason it has been adopted by American artists from Ray Charles to Steve Reich and Alf Clausen, who writes the music for The Simpsons.

However, as parents of any musical child will know, there is a dark side to Sibelius, too. Schools get it cheap, but you do not -- not even for homework. The list price for the software is, gasp, £595. You may get an educational copy for £339, but the Sibelius website says this bargain should be restricted to students within higher education.

In America, Sibelius’s main rival, MakeMusic, has an admirable way of easing the pain. It offers a range of products, starting with the free NotePad composing tool and running through to the top-of-the-range Finale, which many think a match for Sibelius.

Yet we Brits do not do things this way. Sibelius has expanded its product line, but a cut-down version appears to be something it refuses to produce. So, tales of schools allowing pupils to take home music PCs for the weekend are far from uncommon, and the product remains the target of piracy.

There are ways around this expensive dilemma, though. Word-processing and spreadsheet programs have been sharing formats for years, so you can write in one program and share your results with people who prefer something different. Finally, the musical world has realised that it needs the same thing. Its name is MusicXML. Finale 2004 supports it out of the box; Sibelius will play ball if you go to www.recordare.com and spend £16.50 on a plug-in.

Provided the school has upgraded at least to version 2 of Sibelius, your offspring can start a project there, export it out as an MXML file, e-mail it home, import the work into Finale, then do the same in reverse to get it back to the classroom, with only minor glitches.

How much? It’s still not cheap, I’m afraid. Finale usually costs £270 or so, but school students get it for £199 from the distributor, www.etcetera.co.uk. If all you need is a great piece of home-music notation software that will let you take work to school printed out, then Finale’s little brother, PrintMusic, at £49 with a discount from the same site, is a sensible place to start.

Though PrintMusic does not understand MXML, support for the new standard is growing, and I suspect that by next year it will -- and at that price, it will appeal to parents.

So, will Sibelius retaliate with something more modest than its flagship software? I hope so. The Brits have proved they can produce the Rolls-Royce of the composing world, but an everyday Ford would please parents no end.

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Last updated September 27, 2004.