All user reviews of 1/5 for the Avid Sibelius 7

Sibelius 7 is a TRAIN WRECK!

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

"Stable"??? LOL!!!!!

OVERALL OPINION

It's amazing how musicians will pretty much put up with any crap thrown at them... What passes as "professional" notation software is a joke. Obviously no software will be perfect but compared to other industries, music notation software is by far on the bottom of the heap when it comes to reliability and ease of use. And Sibelius 7 is about as bad as it gets. And as if Avid wanted to mock the always dumb subservient musician, it added a hideously ugly purple interface with Playskool icons and crappy amateurish sound samples to match. But what's more disgusting is the poor layout, constant glitches and intermittent crashes. It seems like nothing actually gets fixed unless someone writes a plug-in for it, and many of those plug-in functions should have already been incorporated into the core program from the start. The only other fix is to find a workaround that's usually convoluted and time-consuming, which brings me to my latest gripe and final straw... I was unable to find a way to split a chord between the treble and bass clefs in a piano part so I checked the manual and online for a solution and found this on Sibelius's website:

66: Chords - entering notes from the same chord on different staves

It is a reasonably common notation in piano music that the notes of a chord will be split between the right- and left-hand staves. To achieve this in Sibelius, you should enter the notes directly onto the staves on which they should appear, because you cannot currently cross individual notes of a chord onto another staff. If you enter, for example, the upper two notes of a chord onto the right-hand stave in voice 2 (with stems pointing downwards), you should then enter the remaining notes in the left-hand stave using voice 1, flip the stems (by typing X), and then drag the end of the stems of the right-hand notes down to meet the stem of the left-hand note.
In the case of chords using notes shorter than a quarter-note (crotchet) in value, in Sibelius 5 you can hide the flag or beam of these short notes; just select the flag or beam and go to Edit, Hide or Show, Hide, then proceed as above.
It is not possible to hide flags or beams in versions of Sibelius prior to Sibelius 2. If you need to use this notation regularly, we recommend you get an upgrade.


"Professional" software?? Really??? Avid, by its own admission, says, "It is a reasonably COMMON notation in piano music." So where's the fix??? Plug-in??? This workaround was posted 2007! Either it takes Avid 7 YEARS to fix a glitch or Avid just doesn't give a damn. The fault eventually lands on the always dumb subservient musician that keeps upgrading a broken program even when Avid hasn't fixed what's broken in the earlier versions. You want better software? Stop buying the product! Stop making excuses for the company! Better yet, use and support open-source notation software! Only an IDIOT would support a company that obviously has ZERO respect for its customers.