It’s been more than a year since the last time I used my copy of Sibelius 3, and now I remember why.
If the world worked the way I wanted it to, I would do all of my composing/arranging in SONAR 6, then Sibelius would directly import the SONAR .wrk file and let me tell it how each channel (part) should be laid out (percussion staff, bass/treble clef with the divide at a particular point, how lenient to be before creating multi-part notation on a single staff, what to call each instrument, quick transpose of an entire part by an octave or two since bass guitar parts are usually played an octave below where they’re notated, etc). Instead, I have to export from SONAR to a standard MIDI file, import the MIDI file into Sibelius, then gawk in horror at the trainwreck my masterpiece has become, wondering why the heck a piano part spanning 5 octaves got shoved onto (and around, for several inches on either side) a 5-line percussion staff, why my rhodes part contains some notes with “x” heads, why Sibelius is helpfully flagging ever note below C as “too low” for the bass guitar, and why the vocal and drum tracks are coupled together as a grand staff.
Sibelius’ output looks great, and when I have written from scratch in Sibelius (usually transcribing stuff I had written or learned elsewhere), it’s a pretty good program. But God help me every time I have to import something composed elsewhere into it.
