"Pre-beginner" question - Flexi-time

[chibel]

What comes before beginner? - I'm wondering whether to buy Sibelius.

I don't really need the high standard of scoring facilities that Sibelius provides - mostly, Cubase's scoring capabilities are all I need. But there is a feature that would make me buy Sibelius if it worked well enough, namely Flexi-time.

When I record from a MIDI keyboard into Cubase, I usually ignore the metronome and play freely. This, of course, creates rather meaningless note lengths in the score. That doesn't matter when I just want to capture a naturalistic performance, but it creates a huge problem if I want a printable score - the few times I've tried adjusting the metronome to fit a (MIDI-) recorded performance, it's been a time consuming, painful experience. A couple of times, I experimented with a feature in Cubase designed to make the metronome follow the performance, but I couldn't find settings that would make it follow my playing properly. (As I recall, you had to specify how much and how abruptly the tempo could alter.) It would be unsatisfactory, potentially error-prone and sometimes impossible simply to make two recordings - one of a natural performance with tempo fluctuations and another one equivalent but metronome-rigid to get the score right.

So I have a question for Sibelius users with experience of Flexi-time: how good is it?

[dspreadbury]

If you like to play freely and ignore the metronome entirely, then Flexi-time won't produce good results at all for you.