Sibelius

Sibelius is an excellent tool for transcribing or composing music for students, personal use, ensembles of all kinds, and for online digital sale or music book production. The quality and appearance of the final products are professional and adaptable, as is user-preferences. Transposing an already-formatted piece of music takes seconds, and playback sound quality allows me to hear what I am writing and catch errors. When formatting between the music is too close, text lights up in red. I am a very "visual" person, so I appreciate this. Most commands can be done from the computer keyboard rather than by using a mouse, but a mouse can be used if preferred. Copying and pasting, adding or deleting bars/instruments/sections, and formatting the pages to look and appear the way the transcriber prefers are simple. Online forums and customer service representatives (for the first year after purchase) are beneficial in educating users on how to use the product and solve inquiries. I have also found Sibelius to be the preferred format among major music retailers such as Hal Leonard and Musicnotes.com, both of whom I have worked closely with to produce Lindsey Stirling books and covers/collaborations.

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.