Re: [Finale] Message which didn't make it to the list

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 02:18 PM 4/16/02 -0500, John Howell wrote:
what we need and what almost everyone in music needs is a
program that produces professional looking copy right out of the box in an
intuitive manner that anyone can quickly learn.  No tweaking.  No default
file fiddling around.  [...]

John,

If music were that simple, I'd agree with you. But every program I audition
has the same problem: It makes assumptions about how music should be
entered and edited, how it should look, and who its user base is. In fact,
any application does that. So applications that can handle any field
effectively are going to be as complex as their field.

That said, Finale does work out of the box. Use the tutorials and you're
working in minutes. That's true of Sibelius, that's true of Graphire. But
they all work so differently ... Graphire's output is probably the best
you'll ever see, but it's maddening to use it if you know Finale or if
you're a composer who edits frequently. It's apparently a joy for film
arrangers, though, with piles of handwritten scraps sent to them that have
to be done quickly.

Without trivializing your complaint, I'll say that any powerful application
has these issues. 95%, probably 99%, of MS Word users do little more than
set font sizes and styles, and use templates for anything else (or go to
workshops or even classes). Even so, when I really need good work, I go to
the phenomenally opaque and tempermental Pagemaker. Likewise, I find
Photoshop's Mac-like interface difficul to use, and much prefer Paint Shop
Pro for web work and the bulk of my other graphics. But for print-quality
subtle work, I have to use Photoshop.

Would I recommend Finale today, among all the competition? Probably, yes.
That's because my own music has so many special requirements that only
Finale and Score can do them all (I've never used Score, but another person
input a few sections for me that no other software could handle, even
Finale ... but it has (had?) no Midi for making demos).

I know that here in Vermont, the schools are buying Sibelius because the
teachers simply do not want to spend the time on learning Finale's range of
features. I tried to get Coda to help support our Ought-One Festival, but
they ended up not doing it ... I probably could have saved their (small,
admittedly) Vermont clientele by doing demos. So where I live, the schools
agree with you.

The only problem with adopting any program is that you train users to that
interface and invest in that data structure. And if the program (1) can't
handle your future needs as they grow more sophisticated, (2) requires a
'psychological' and historical investment that can't be recouped by
transfer to another program, and (3) is no longer supported by a vanished
business with no stable history (our schools didn't learn from their
previous investment in Music Time), then it makes the choice of a younger
company or newer software a risky affair. I wouldn't touch Igor with its
near-nonexistent financing. And, to be fair, I have a 10-year investment in
scores prepared in Finale.

Despite the tremendous learning required by Finale, Pagemaker, Quark,
Photoshop, Sonar, Cubase, and even MSWord, those companies have been around
and are pretty stable, have vital support from a wide user base, and can
likely handle most tasks demanded of them.

Tough choice.

Dennis




___
Finale mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] Message which didn't make it to the list

[Mark D. Lew]

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