At 6:57 AM 07/13/02, David H. Bailey wrote:
>I have found that it is easiest (at least to my convoluted mind) to
>simply enter as many occurances of the word as I want in the score.
> [...]
>I know it may seem to be more work initially, but when I edit things
>later on my life is so much easier!
Yes, my convoluted mind, too. I too almost always type in every lyric
separately, for exactly the reasons you state.
--
At 12:36 PM 07/13/02, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
>Now, what I found [Note: this may have been installed in Fin2k3; I've not
>installed
>it yet, so haven't checked to see if this has been fixed] is this.
>Imagine that I
>make an error in entering the text, entering a two syllable word ("father") as
>having three syllables ("fa-t-her"), and imagine further that the proper
>place for
>the second syllable is the second note following the note assigned to the
>first. If
>I correct this in "type into score", I can remove the 't' from the intervenient
>syllable, and prepend it to the proper syllable. If I then go to the
>"edit lyrics"
>box, I find that in that place, the string "fa--ther" appears. I can
>remove the
>second hyphen, resulting in "fa-ther", and when I go back to the score,
>all of the
>syllables are attached to their appropriate syllables. However, if I go
>straight to
>the dialogue box, and edit out the "t-" there, when I go back to the
>score, I find
>that all following syllables have shifted left by one note, and the last
>note in the
>line now shows the label of the next line. [...]
Thanks for the thorough explanation. Your method of entering only the
first and last word by click-assignment and using type-in-score for the
rest feels very odd to me, but I believe I now understand what you're
describing.
For what it's worth, the second phenomenon you describe (ie, the one where
it messes things up) is how lyrics always worked in the older versions of
Finale. That is, Finale thinks of all the syllables as a occupying a
certain position in the Edit Lyrics window, and every lyric assignment is
keyed to the position in the Lyrics window. Thus, if you were to start
moving the syllables around, your assignments will be all screwed up, and
that's why those of us who learned lyrics on the older version have learned
to be very careful with lyrics and never mess with them except under
controlled circumstances.
In the older system, if you were to use type-in-score, Finale would simply
add syllables as necessary to the end of the list in the Lyrics box, so
that if you didn't do your type-in-score entry in an orderly fashion, your
Lyrics window would end up as a crazy hodgepodge that would be hard to make
sense of.
As a result of occasional experiment under the new system, I see that
Finale now makes a pretty good effort to second guess the user who enters
his lyrics in a disorderly fashion. For instance, if you use type-in-score
to go back and add a syllable in the middle of a line, Finale makes the
reasonable guess that you're going to want to see that appear in the
appropriate position in the Edit Lyrics window, so it inserts the new
syllable into the right place and adjusts all the subsequent assignments
accordingly (instead of just tagging it on to the end, as in the old
version). Or if you delete a syllable in the Edit Lyrics window, it makes
the reasonable guess that you don't really intend to knock all of your
assignments off-sync, so it makes sure to adjust them all accordingly.
Clearly what is happening in your example is that Finale is trying to guess
your intentions, but it is guessing inconsistently depending on what you
do.
That said, it's probably possible for Coda to clean up this procedure to
make it more predictable and more like what the user will expect, but it's
not an easy task. The problem is that there's no obvious "correct" order
for the lyrics to appear in the Edit Lyrics box. Finale might assume that
the syllables should order themselves in exactly the order they are
entered, but that fails to satisfy the user if he enters some syllables out
of order. On the other hand, Finale might assume that the syllables should
order themselves to match their appearance in the score (ie, from left to
right in scroll view), but that runs into problems if the user has
re-assigned the same lyrics to different spaces in the score.
The bottom line is that to a certain extent you're asking Finale to read
the user's mind, and that's always going to be tough.
The whole thing would be less mysterious if Finale were more explicit about
what it's really doing. If, for example, all the lyric syllables appeared
in a numbered list like expressions, and any click to change a lyric would
jump you to the lyric syllable definition. Then, at least, it would be
more obvious to the user what's going on "under the hood". But of course,
the whole point is that Finale hopes to make lyrics more intuitive and
therefore they really don't want users to see that.
--
By the way, I'm not entirely sold on Finale's entire lyric scheme, though
I'm well accustomed to it by now. Because of the potential pitfalls, I
almost never assign the same lyric syllable to more than one note, so I'd
feel little or no loss at all if the whole indirect pointer scheme were
abandoned entirely and the lyric syllable were just a chunk of text
attached to a note (as they were in Lime).
On the other hand, I do very much appreciate the ability to manipulate the
lyric baselines in a wide variety of ways. The system is confusing to
beginners, I know, but it is extremely powerful and useful. I wouldn't want
to lose that, and I'm not sure how easy it would be to preserve if the
underlying scheme were changed.
mdl
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