John Howell wrote: > [...] I will >never need and never use 90% of its fancy bells and whistles, and neither >will our students. Sibelius sounds better and better to me for what the >average musician, not the professional engraver, needs in a program.
Hm, I guess "bells and whistles" is in the mind of the beholder, eh? I tend to think of the document settings and special tools as the nuts and bolts of the program, and for me the "bells and whistles" are the various out-of-the-box templates, wizards, and goofy plug-ins that try to write the music for you. [*] I think you're right on the money that, relative to other programs, Finale is oriented more to the professional engraver and less to the average musician. You're also right that average musicians are the much more significant market, and if Finale is going to remain viable, it needs to pay better attention to the needs of those average musicians. An unhappy consequence of this reality is that we may very well see Finale evolve in a way as to become less useful for professional engraving, and general engraving standards may very well decline as a result. A similar thing happened with non-music typography with the advent of desktop publishing. Publishing is a big enough market that traditional standards mostly survived, but not without some adaptation. Even at the highest levels of professional publishing there are a few minor ways in which inferior DTP standards have asserted themselves, and in the vast range of middle-level professional work one sees quite a bit of typographic sloppiness which would have been considered unprofessional 20 years ago. I expect the same thing will happen -- is happening -- with published music. MS Word is perhaps a good model for Finale. As much as I dislike Word, for various reasons, it does manage to combine out-of-the-box immediacy with quite a bit of control over the appearance of the document for those who care to take the trouble. It's still not my application of choice for publishing (I too like FrameMaker), but the way in which it does all your thinking for you by default, but is willing to get out of the way (mostly...) when you know better, is probably the best professional engravers can hope for if Finale is to compete with programs like Sibelius. I don't mind all the default features like automatic this and automatic that, so long as I can turn them off when I don't want them and I still have reasonably convenient access to all the underlying data. mdl [*] I must confess -- although I realize this is very eccentric of me -- I still haven't got past thinking of all MIDI and playback functions as "frills". I wouldn't expect my word processing application to read my letters out loud; why should a notation program be different? I use Finale to write the music on paper, not to play it. That's what instruments and musicians are for. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
