Comments about:

GVOX, Finale and Sibelius Switch War

Encore is an excellent easy to use notation software. It doesn't have all the bells & whistles of Finale or Sibelius but it's far more intuitive.
It supports all the standard note entry methods, the playback engine kan play back your score with repeats, endings and quite a few midi-driven expressions, like volume, swells etc.

Version 4.5.4 for Mac OS-X have limited support for sound/synth modules however and it's midi implementation is somewhat limited in scope.
( I can not get access to all sounds in my Proteus-2000 as an example)
Encore produces easy to read scores and can handle fairly complex layouts with aplomb.

If you dont need all the features of Finale or Sibelius, I can heartily recommend Encore, I have been using it for years. It's really very easy to get started with and can handle most everyday scoring tasks.

Thanks for your thoughts! I know there are many, many faithful Encore users so I expected to get some response from them. I wonder, though, is Encore really easier to use than Sibelius? I used Encore years ago, and do recall it was easy to learn, but I have found (any many others have found) Sibelius quite easy to pick up. I regularly teach the software, too, so I'm grateful that it is easy to learn Sibelius because I'm often dealing with extreme newbies.

Iit seems if you're going to pay full price for a program, unless you're already invested in the Encore way of doing things (and even possibly if you are), you're more likely to look at Sibelius or Finale. Either is more full-functioned than Encore in my testing: and that's not just bells and whistles, that's how well the notation, automatic formatting, and automatic layout work. The idea of switching TO Encore from Sibelius or Finale just doesn't make any sense to me -- although, if I had a backlog of Encore files, as many people do, I would JUMP at this offer to run Encore side by side with either of the other programs.

Of course, if you are already using Encore, I think you'll really appreciate what GVOX has done to bring it into the 21st Century and out of temporary obscurity. You won't need the switch offer, per se, but you'll be happy to continue what you're using.