[richiebee]

One of my arranger friends uses Finale (despite my recommendation that he buy Sibelius!), and I know he had a bitch of a time doing the MIDI set up. What's more, he found that the latency was way too high to allow him to play live anyway!

I use Sibelius, and since I'm not a great keyboardist, I actually find it faster to input notes by hand. Once you've got the key strokes down, it's really easy (and apparently also in Finale: another composer friend of mine uses manual input even though he's an accomplished pianist).

I've done three piece horn section arrangements in Sibelius and had them printed out before our rhythm section is ready to bash out new arrangements with horns on new tracks.

But, I guess if you want to do it by inputting notes, Finale should be able to handle it for you. I'm sorry I don't have any other answers for you. If you are inputting everything with a keyboard though, you might consider putting your parts in in Cubase. Cubase will give you a much more friendly graphic representation of what you're doing, even if the actual notation side is not as comprehensive. You can export from Cubase to Finale if you want to check the integrity of your parts, although I'd go with whatever sounds right, is right and forget Finale altogether.

I only use notation software where I need to print out parts and give them to real musicians (maybe you're the same). With samples and synths, too much tweaking needs to be done with controllers to get stuff to sound authentic to bother with notation software for this task.

I'm not saying you're wrong to consider using Finale for your input, but just that its not the only way.