[dj]

Hello, Mal:

I would think that, for school use, Notation products are the hands-down winner.

To start, for the price of one copy of Sibelius, you can get about 8 copies of Notation Composer.

The current Sibelius (version 5?) does have built-in sample playback, but Windows has a built-in system that would do very well for most school situations, so that isn't a great difference. The Sibelius playback engine is not that great, if I recall from a short test of the of demo.

I work with a professional arranger who uses Sibelius exclusively. For his purposes, there are probably advantages, but I can, with Composer, create printed notation that is so close to Sibelius' printouts that it makes no effective difference.

Sibelius does have some more advanced features: cross-staff beaming, cross-bar beaming, compound time signatures and so on. For 99% of school work, none of that is needed -- and things like cross-staff beaming are modern "shorthand", anyway, and should be avoided when teaching basics.

Sibelius is not (or at least was not) really geared toward live midi recording, while that has always been the strong point of Notation products. The quality of the transcription engine that Mark Walsen created was what brought me to Notation Software long before Notation Composer even existed.

There is an old tech rule of thumb: buy the product that can give you 80% of the function for 50% of the price. Notation software offers about 95% of the function for 20% of the price.

Hope that biased evaluation helps.

David