At 10:18 PM 06/27/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >I have already alerted the people at Coda Music about this. Convincing them >it's something worth investigating, well that's another matter. They are >reluctant to change anything, even to go from "incorrect" to "correct." They >said they don't want to tick off their users, although I would think that >fixing a problem should make their customers happy. At least it would make me >more confident of their product.
If the snotty attitude that I hear in this post is also in your emails to Coda, that could help explain why they aren't very enthusiastic about helping you. >What I am wondering about is whether the MAC version (mis)behaves the same >way as my Windows version. To test this, set up two measures in A flat with 8 >quarter notes that are B flats. Now go into the "speedy entry" tool, and >change the first quarter notes of each measure to B natural using the + key, >which is supposed to raise ONLY ONE note to B natural. What happens is that >it puts a natural before the quarter note, but then does NOT put a flat >before the second quarter note. [...] No, that's not what happens. I'm using Mac v2002 (but not 2002b). I don't experience the problem you describe. Mine puts the flat on the second note, as it should. My guess is that you have "check accidentals" turned off under the Speedy menu. Turn that back on and I bet the problem goes away. >Now I used the "hide/show courtesy accidentals" (*) key on the natural, and >it makes the natural disappear, which is also wrong, since the natural is NOT >a courtesy accidental. It is needed there to change the pitch, not for >clarification purposes. This further causes an inconsistency with what is >played, because now when the natural disappears, the implication is all the >notes are B flats again. Once again, it has no effect on the played pitches. I think you must have misunderstood someone's instructions. There's no reason to use the "*" key on the FIRST note; that will only hide the accidental, as you described, which makes things worse. What you need to do is use the "*" key on the SECOND note, to UN-hide the absent flat. >One of the people at Coda said," Well the natural is still there, you've >hidden it." Why would you ever want that in any practical situation? Under normal circumstances, you don't want to, but there are plenty of exceptional cases where it's necessary (eg, cross staff notes). Your problem here is precisely that the natural did get hidden (probably because "check accidentals" is off) and it needs to be unhidden. >Are we >in the business of playing tricks on musicians? Certainly hiding UNNECCESARY >accidentals is OK, though, but the software has to be smart enough to know >the difference. Yes, and it is. >I'm sure they have some very bright and experienced people on their staff, >but the ones I deal with sometimes -- well, I have to shake my head and feel >sorry for them. I do agree that some of the tech support people are difficult to communicate with, with the result that they aren't very helpful. But I think your reaction to this situation, leaping to the conclusion that the program is fundamentally flawed, is ludicrous. Do you think you're the only one who has ever applied an accidental to the first note in a measure? If the program really behaved as your are implying, that would be a really really blatant bug and we all would have heard about it long ago. Obviously, you are dealing with a much more subtle problem. Accidentals behave correctly most of the time, but you have stumbled into some strange situation where they are messed up. Possibly it's some obscure bug, or more likely you've inadvertently done something to cause the hidden accidental. >From reading your description, I can see exactly what happened in your correspondence with tech support: You described the problem. From your description, the tech guy figured out that the flat on the second note is hidden, so he instructed you to use "*" to unhide it. Due to miscommunication by one side or the other, you heard this as an instruction to use the "*" on the first note (instead of the second). You did so, thus hiding the natural on the first note, so that now BOTH accidentals are missing. You wrote back to tech support complaining that the natural is still gone. The tech guy didn't realize that the first instruction was miscommunicated, so he answered your question about the absent natural (on the second note) saying that it is hidden, which is technically correct, even though it doesn't answer your real question. In other words, first, you accidentally turned off an important setting, causing strange results. Then, in trying to discuss this with tech support, you got a confusing and unhelpful answer. From that, you concluded that Finale has a huge fundamental flaw in it, everyone at Coda is either too ignorant or too stubborn to fix it, and everyone else who uses Finale is either too ignorant or compliant to complain about it. That's ridiculous. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
