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Written by Jon Ensminger
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Thursday, 03 July 2008 |
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I just saw news of a new version of Sibelius, a scaled down version for less money, for people who don't need the full feature set of Sibelius 5. As a teacher and long-time Sibelius user, I've always been frustrated by the lack of an entry-level version for students and others. This looks like a product that will make Sibelius more competitive with MakeMusic's line of Finale-compatible products. You can read more about it, compare features, and download a fully-functioning review copy here. It's also available from amazon.com at a fairly reasonable price.   Write Comment (0 Comments) |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 03 July 2008 )
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Written by Jon Ensminger
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Monday, 30 June 2008 |
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I've been busy updating the site recently. This summer has been a busy one, but one of my main goals has been to make the site easier to navigate, update links (especially to blogs and podcasts), and start developing a larger "Music Gallery," consolidating all of the information about sheet music, recordings, and free downloads into one "place." Part of the motivation for all of this is a desire to make the website more useful as a tool for independent piano teachers. I plan to use the Music Gallery frequently in my studio, especially since I am now "on my own," so to speak. There is still a long way to go to get it where it needs to be, but we're makling progress - with new links to Baroque, Classical, and Romantic Era MP3 downloads from amazon.com - often including recordings of the same repertoire by different artists. I plan to integrate the links to the sheet music and printed collections more fully with the links to recordings. Later this summer I'm hoping to increase the number and quality of free downloads, as well as add a whole new section of music theory tuturials. I'm taking a summer course now on object-oriented programming in Java, and I'm hoping to learn more about the Adobe Flex platform on my own, which has great potential for developing music applications on the web. The theory tutorials might have to wait, depending upon how quickly I'm able to assimilate some of this stuff. Java already contains several Classes and methods related to sound and MIDI. Adobe Actionscript 3 (the main language of Flex) also has some sound components, but it lacks the MIDI components. There are ways to interact with other languages in Flex, though, so maybe . . .? |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 30 June 2008 )
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