On 16 Jul 2002, at 10:18, Linda Worsley wrote: > I love Finale, warts and all, and while I understand the many > complaints, I sometimes want to go on the list and shout "This is > your mother speaking! Stop whining or I'll stop he car!" Don't ANY > of you remember what it was like to make scores with ink and Ozalid? > Ink and Paper? Even pencil and paper? And NO PLAYBACK at all
I vehemently disagree with these kinds of posts that say Coda should not "waste" time on improving MIDI facilities. For professionals like Linda, who have dedicated professional-level sequencers for polishing up a MIDI performance, that's all well and good. But Finale's MIDI and playback facilities (two different issues, I'd say) still need to be kept up-to-date or they will serve to frustrate (and drive away) the new user populations that Coda needs to attract to Finale in order to stay in business. New programs *can* take over categories previously "owned" by other programs, even without monopoly control of a market (e.g., Wordstar ->WordPerfect in the old DOS word processing days), and they do it by adding features and ease of use that the old programs do not have. In the Wordstar/WordPerfect example, it was universal printer support, especially for laser printers and proportional fonts, that tipped the balance, along with a plain user interface that allowed easier onscreen document formatting (hiding the codes made it a lot easier to tell what was going to print). For Finale, the problems art two-fold: 1. making Finale provide acceptable playback out of the box, taking into account all reasonable information in the score (including hairpins and slurs). 2. making the parts of the MIDI interface that are really bad (any of the continuous controllers, for instance) easier to use, utilizing the same UI conventions that have proven over time to be the easiest for users to understand. For those who don't use Finale playback for anything other than aural proofreading, these things would improve that playback and cut down on the amount of work necessary get the most basic playback. For those who could use better playback control and MIDI capabilities in Finale, this will be a boon. And for the new users that Finale needs to attract to stay viable, it would also remove one major hurdle to wider acceptance of Finale. Personally, I have a lot of difficulty with sequencers because I'm so bloody notation-oriented. To me, the world's worst representation of musical data is a piano roll or an event list (even though I understand that these representations are useful for certain tasks; well, I understand the use of event lists; piano rolls I see no utility in whatsoever -- they take up a huge amount of space to represent the data while leaving out an awful lot of information; there's a good reason why we don't use piano roll notation as our standard, because it's so horridly inefficient and while precise, impossible for a human being to interpret reliably without special tools; but I digress), and the idea of volume knobs and sliders for representing continuous data that change over time seems a terrible idea. And the other issue is that as a Finale file gets edited, all the tweaks in the sequencer have to be re-applied to the new source MIDI file. Maybe I don't wait long enough to produce the MIDI file for tweaking, but I just hate the idea of having to re-do edits that have already been done in another file. If all the performance editing is done in Finale, the MIDI file produced by Finale will always be up-to-date. That said, I see no utility in providing full sequencing capabilities. But basic control of tempo and volume should be easy and straightforward. Access to more advanced features could perhaps be provided with access to an event list, so that the advanced user who needs to insert SYSEX messages or something not editable through the interface Finale provides would still be able to make esoteric changes without having to resort to a sequencer. And last of all, it always puzzles me why people who don't want time spent on improving a feature of Finale somehow assume that it is entirely a zero-sum game. Yes, Coda's programmers have finite time, so given any particular time period, only so much work can be done, and if playback editing is completely revamped, it probably means that *for this particular upgrade cycle* some other major area of the program will *not* be revamped. But in the end, if we assume that the program will continue to be produced and updated by Coda, all the major elements of Finale will be addressed, as Coda has shown over the years already. Revamping playback facilities does not of necessity mean that the same upgrade will not also greatly improve tuplet editing and control. It depends on what Coda considers a priority, based on both comments from their existing user base, and on what Coda ascertains are the needs of the broader community of potential Finale users. Right now, from what I understand, playback control is one of the most out-dated areas of the program, little changed in much more than five years. I am still using WinFin97, and from what I've heard and read, playback control has not changed in any major way since then. And the facilities in WinFin97 are little different from what they were in 3.52, the first version of Finale in which I utilized playback facilities at all (didn't have a sound card before then). Almost all other major aspects of Finale have undergone significant improvement since then (text handling, page layout, slurs, beaming, etc.), and I think playback is just about due. I fear that if some attention is not paid to the issue soon, Finale will get a reputation as being hard to learn/use. Oops! Too late! -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
