leander

Cubase vs Reaper depends partly on your budget. The cheapest Cubase seems to be around 150 while Reaper is 60. I don't know how good the midi side of that cheapest Cubase is. I mainly use Reaper for two things. 1) Envelopes to get the final balance between audio tracks exported from Sibelius. That feature in Reaper is good enough for me. 2) But my second main need is midi editing and Reaper is rather frustrating many times. If I find a cheap and good midi editing environment I will have a close look at it.

I have learned to live with the bugs in HA. No problem. HA compared to Sibelius is not a problem. If you have to make an oil painting you start with a pencil and make a sketch. When you are satisfied with that you move over to the oil colors. For me HA is the pencil and when the sketch is OK I continue with Sibelius to make it into something real. In the first drafts you often want to insert or delete notes, replace a quarter with two eights or one eight or change the duration of a note in a melody. HA makes inserts and deletes a trivial thing compared to how Sibelius makes it complicated. Or there are perhaps features in Sibelius that I have not noticed. For me Sibelius was a substantial investment but I don't regret it. It is easy to write scripts for HA. I have written perhaps ten scripts that makes sketching fast and easy. So my tools are HA->Sibelius->Reaper. I have looked a Logic Express as a replacement for Reaper but don't really know yet. I recently bought a midi keyboard, KeyStudio 49. I have tested it with all three programs. My preliminary feeling is that Sibelius is the best of the three for my kind of live input.

Try "Harmony Assistant". It is excellent value for its modest price. You can do all kinds of work with it. Or if you want to start with something really basic try "Melody Assistant". I started with them and when I was ready for it I bought Sibelius. For fast preliminary sketches Harmony Assistant is easier and faster. You can export musicXML (Sibelius can read but not export).

The Kookaburra trial in Australia is really worrying. What is plagiarism and what is not? I have noticed that I unintentionally sometimes write something which is near something I heard a long time ago and had forgotten. What are the new constraints on compositions like "Variations on a theme by xx"? Have you established your copyright to a tune a chord progression or a fragment when it is published, e.g., on this site? I am confused and worried. Not because of my own helpless efforts. I would be proud if someone found something worth copying in what I produce. But how do those of you who are professional composers and have to make a living out of it adapt to the new worries. Or perhaps they are not new or not worries? My career was in mathematical sciences and for text there are fairly clear rules. Sometimes appr. 30 words in sequence without mentioning the source is the limit. But if the source is credited then it is OK to quote. Universities use programs that crawl through millions of texts to check the limits. Will there be a program that does the same for music. Terrible idea. What will it do to creativity if you have to be afraid that someone sues you all the time? This is a confused posting because I am confused. Sorry for that. I hope this is the right group. I joined yesterday and this is my second posting.