Avid offers Sibelius, a musical notation, creation, and publishing application.
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Anchor by Spotify
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Anchor, by Spotify, is a podcasting platform, enabling the user to create, distribute, and monetize a podcast. It is available via a free plan. It features built-in uploading, recording, and editing tools so the can easily create and publish episodes.
It is simply easy to use and serves the function that it needs to serve. Once you get the hang of the basic functionality and a few of the keyboard shortcuts, it will be extremely easy and quick to write out music. The option to go back and transpose to another key without writing the whole thing out again is crucial.
Anchor is a great podcast app for folks just starting out with podcasting or who want some of the technical things to be streamlined and simplified. With the built-in audience of Spotify subscribers, it's also easy to get started with a listening audience. There are easy ways to connect to other Podcast platforms and easy ways to integrate ads if that's something you want to do as a podcaster.
Monetization features are currently present in only a limited number of countries, I look forward to the various monetization features like pre-roll and mid-roll ads to be made available soon in my country India.
Add more platforms to its distribution services such as Amazon Music and similar ones so that we would not be required to submit the RSS Feed to platforms manually.
Once Sibelius is purchased, the user is given one year of unlimited free customer service to help in using the product. After that first year, users can either pay to utilize customer service with questions or use online helps, which are very helpful. One of the bigger issues I had was getting the sounds to work properly because my Internet connection wasn't consistently working well enough to accommodate the large files, which were taking up to 10 hours to download. The download would fail, and then I'd have to start over. I wanted to get a CD sent to me but was told this would be very costly, and so I declined. I wasn't happy with the lack of customer service in that situation but was eventually able to get the files to download and the software working properly.
I have not used Finale exclusively, but I know friends/colleagues who have. In the past, it was complicated to transfer and edit any of the music they created for me because it would not transfer to Sibelius. As a result, I would have to request the edits I wanted and ask them to make the changes themselves. If I wanted to make any changes later, it was extremely inconvenient to do so, and I often chose not to, as I did not want to bother anyone other than myself to do any edits after-the-fact. Though it is now possible to transfer Finale files to Sibelius through creating .xml files and then importing as .sib files, the files still do not entirely retain all of the integrity of the original composition (as completed in Finale). Sometimes text and markings are missing, microscopic, or shifted once opened in Sibelius. Text fonts must often be edited. When working with other major music publishers, it has been extremely convenient and helpful to have the same software.
Anchor is less expensive and, in my opinion, much easier to use than SoundCloud for podcasting. Anchor makes syndication easy, and their recording and editing interfaces are clean and intuitive. SoundCloud seemed somewhat cumbersome to use, and I didn't care for its UI. Honestly, they seem better suited for other use cases.
