Over 20 years ago I needed to do some engraving for a school band project, and went online looking for a solution. At the time there was SCORE, which produced beautiful pages but was a massive dog to get running on XP (dos emulators were rare and difficult to use), finale, Sibelieus, and LilyPond.
Finale was nice but far too expensive, and Sibelieus was nicer for slightly cheaper. Both rather hard amounts of money to come up with in middle and high school. So that left LilyPond.
My father is a scientist, and therefore quite handy with TeX, so he pushed me rather hard in the direction of LilyPond, running in cygwin. Took me about a week to pick it up, and another week to get my engraving looking the way I wanted. Turned it in after that and got a B from the band teacher, because apparently the school had finale on the library computers, and my output was subtly different (not wrong, different stylistic approaches to auxillary notation such as crescendos) than that of finale.
I still use lilypond to this day. I've played a bit with Sibelieus in the interim, and then dorico when Sibelieus went to hell and dorico was created. Still prefer lilypond.
But all through that period, finale basically felt like the Microsoft office of music engraving. The big juggernaut that no one can topple. Sure, the output of a finale engraving looked like it was a finale engraving, and others might have more aesthetically pleasing output, but finale was the standard. Seeing an upstart like dorico kill them is akin to something like Pages or Zoho office killing word.
Over 20 years ago I needed to do some engraving for a school band project, and went online looking for a solution. At the time there was SCORE, which produced beautiful pages but was a massive dog to get running on XP (dos emulators were rare and difficult to use), finale, Sibelieus, and LilyPond.
Finale was nice but far too expensive, and Sibelieus was nicer for slightly cheaper. Both rather hard amounts of money to come up with in middle and high school. So that left LilyPond.
My father is a scientist, and therefore quite handy with TeX, so he pushed me rather hard in the direction of LilyPond, running in cygwin. Took me about a week to pick it up, and another week to get my engraving looking the way I wanted. Turned it in after that and got a B from the band teacher, because apparently the school had finale on the library computers, and my output was subtly different (not wrong, different stylistic approaches to auxillary notation such as crescendos) than that of finale.
I still use lilypond to this day. I've played a bit with Sibelieus in the interim, and then dorico when Sibelieus went to hell and dorico was created. Still prefer lilypond.
But all through that period, finale basically felt like the Microsoft office of music engraving. The big juggernaut that no one can topple. Sure, the output of a finale engraving looked like it was a finale engraving, and others might have more aesthetically pleasing output, but finale was the standard. Seeing an upstart like dorico kill them is akin to something like Pages or Zoho office killing word.