At 9:33 AM 09/18/02, David W. Fenton wrote: >However correct you may be as the voice of experience, that is the >most ludicrous advice I've ever heard. [...] > >That's a really serious indictment of the stability of the Finale >file format.
First of all, David, welcome to the club. Those of us who use lyrics on a regular basis have been complaining about the weak implementation for years. If you have any more voice with Coda than we do, we will welcome your support. I don't mean to give the wrong impression. I agree with you that there are serious problems with Finale's lyric system. I wouldn't use characterizations like "corrupt", "broken" and "bug" the same as you do, but the fact that it's possible for a user to inadvertently make a mess of things is definitely a problem. If it seems like I'm defensive of the system, it's because I'm a little miffed to see a person who, by his own admission, a week ago had no idea how lyrics work, and by the evidence of his posts still doesn't really understand it, nevertheless has the audacity to come along and tell us how the program ought to work. A lot of the suggestions you make which would make lyrics easier for you would make it less efficient for the rest of us. I'm all in favor of making lyrics more intuitive and less treacherous for inexperienced users, but not if it comes at the cost of dumbing down functionality for those of us who know what we're doing. The lyric system is definitely in need of improvement, but an intelligent improvement needs to take into account all of the functions that regular users of lyrics need. In that respect, you simply are not speaking from a position of knowledge. >I will mail the file to Coda to ask them to fix it before I will even >contemplate re-doing literally hours and hours of lyrics placement. Hours and hours? What kind of file takes hours and hours to assign lyrics? Either you're exaggerating or you work very slowly. If you want to email a copy of the file, I'd be happy to take a look. I don't know that it will be of much practical help, but it might help focus this discussion if I can figure out exactly where you went awry. A cc of whatever you send to tech support would be fine. >From my point of view I was not doing anything haphazard. It's only >in the crazy upside-down world of Finale lyrics copying that I was >being haphazard. Fair enough. From my point of view, if you copy lyric assignments and then use type-in-score to alter a syllable which is already assigned elsewhere, that is haphazard. (And if you then go back to the first assignment and alter them back, that is even more haphazard.) >> Your initial problem resulted from this. Your subsequent problems with >> hyphens, mixed up syllables, and so forth resulted from trying to go behind >> the scenes and patch together repairs. > >I did nothing but type-in-score corrections -- nothing behind-the- >scenes at all. "Behind the scenes" was a poor choice of words. My apologies. From my point of view, type-in-score *is* behind the scenes, but I can see how it would look the opposite to you. >In fact, I used only the editing facilities exposed by the >programmers, so the results should be reliable and consistent. That >they are not shows that the program is fundamentally broken. Well, the results are reliable and consistent, they're just reliably and consistently what you don't want. As I mentioned in the other post, I think the type-in-score for lyrics was a bad idea (I personally never use it), because it allows the user to make a change in the lyric text data which will affect all assignments, without going through some dialog that makes it clear that that is what's going on. In other words, it opens the door to unintended consequences which are not immediately recognized. That is bad. (An even larger problem, in my opinion, is the fact that when syllables are added and deleted using type-in-score, Finale tries to second-guess your intention with regards to how to order them in the Edit Lyrics window. Obviously, this was done for the sake of the occasional stray syllable deletion or insertion after the main entry, and for such cases is it works nicely. But it also opens the door for even more serious unintended consequences for the user who carelessly edits multiply assigned syllables with type-in-score.) >The changes to the musical text were trivial to recreate in >comparison to the Draconian advice that I have to completely redo the >lyrics from scratch. I'm still amazed that re-assigning lyrics could be such a huge task. I think of it as one of the quicker parts of the entry process. Is this just a matter of experience? It is just the difference between click-assign and type-in-score? >> . . . It is exactly analogous to how articulations >> and expressions work. If you were to copy several measures of music >> complete with all the expressions, and then went in to change individual >> instances of "mf" or "cresc" to "mp" or "dimin.", you would make a hash of >> your expression list and foul up other instances of those same expressions >> in the same document. > >But lyrics and articulation definitions are fundamentally different. > >Lyrics are like the musical text. If Finale created a mirror by >default and offered no other copying method, *that* would be >analogous to the way lyrics work. No, David, lyrics are NOT like the musical text. What you are describing is how you think it ought to be, not how it is. Your inability to reconcile the way you feel the data ought to be structured and the way it actually is structured is at the heart of the difficulty you're having. >Oh, bollocks. This is an instance where Finale is fundamentally >broken. The default behavior of the copy is one issue alone, an ill- >chosen default with no sensible alternative. But the real issue is >that the process is not *reversible*, that once the mistake has been >made, you can't undo it. You could have easily undone it, IF you noticed it when you first did it. The problem here is that the interface makes it possible for you to accidentally alter the data in a way you did not intend without noticing it until much later. Here is one point where you and I might agree, because I too feel that is a serious flaw in the program design. If when you made your first alteration to the copied lyric you had immediately noticed that it made a corresponding change to the original lyric as well, you would have said, "oops, that's not what I wanted" and you would have used the undo function to reverse it. The problem is that, because the unintended change was far away in your score, you didn't notice it, so you proceeded with numerous edits and didn't notice the error until much much later. >> . . . Unless you're revamping the whole lyric scheme >> altogether, that would be illogical and inconsistent with how the system >> works. Would you have it do the same thing for expressions? > >Expressions copy in exactly the way that's expected. Yes, and lyrics copy in the same way that expressions do, but that isn't what you expected. >This is very different from any issue I've ever encountered, in that >my data is corrupt and I can't correct the corruption short of >deleting all lyrics data and starting over. Suppose that you have a four-bar passage which for some reason gets entered entirely wrong, but you fail to notice the error and proceed with entering the rest of the piece. After the first proof, you notice that the passage is hopelessly mangled, but of course you can't use "undo" to fix it because then you'd lose all the rest of your work. You could then say, "my data is corrupt and I can't correct the corruption short of clearing all four bars and starting over". The fact that the lyrics got messed up in the first place is in large part due to the screwiness of the system, yes. The fact that you can't magically repair them without starting over is nothing unusual at all. >What the hell does "haphazard" mean? If the UI allows it, there's >nothing haphazard about it. The UI allows me to transpose down 12 octaves. The UI allows me to rebar an entire piece to 1/16 time. Surely you're not taking the position that the UI should make it impossible to do anything stupid. >From my point of view I did nothing >"haphazard" at all. I entered the lyrics syllable by syllable, page >by page of my source score. I then copied and started editing the >copied lyrics. > >This was not "haphazard" in any human-meaningful sense -- it was >fundamentally logical and systematic. That Finale screwed up the data >shows that the haphazardness is inside Finale itself. No, you screwed up the data. Finale did exactly what you asked it to do, it edited the copied lyrics. The problem is that you thought you could edit one assignment without affecting the others. I agree that the program should make that more clear to users. >> [*] One thing that would make all these problems go away is if it were >> changed so that it's impossible to assign the same syllable more than once. > >But then that would take away the capability of re-using a single >text block in more than one place. That capability is a *good* thing. >That it is the *default* for copying is where things start to go >wrong. That a mistaken copy operation is not reversiable is the most >serious problem. It *is* reversible. You just didn't notice it in time to reverse it. If you were paying careful attention to every edit you made, you could still reverse it. Since you weren't, it's easier to clear out the lyrics and start over, but for some reason you're resisting that. -- Obviously, David, you and I aren't going to agree on most of this. To whatever extent you would like help in learning how to make best use of Finale the way it is, I'm happy to offer it. If we're just going to argue about how wrong it is and how it ought to be, you and I have each stated our position and we disagree on many points. I have no further interest in trying to persuade you otherwise; if you want to continue to try to persuade me, have at it. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
