At 07:44 PM 12/30/2003, helgesen wrote: >Thanks Aaron, but it leaves me wondering why the basic Finale doesn't do >these things. >And while I am totally in awe of folks like Tobias and Robert Patterson who >create these brilliant plug ins, why should they need to?- obviously because >of deficiency in the basic Finale program.
I think you can argue this either way. I agree that some of the things provided by plugins are things that one can reasonably expect Finale to have built in. Which is probably why Finale has begun including some of Robert's and Tobias's plugins. On the other hand, while Finale does make it possible to do almost anything to a score, it may not be reasonable to expect that it can do everything in a simple and automated manner. On the third hand, the fact that Finale gives plugins so much power is one of the big strengths of the program.
In many ways, Finale is analagous to other complex programs like Photoshop or Quark XPress. These are expensive, powerful programs, but most users find that a roster of third-party plugins make them that much more useful.
>And while I do not wish to stop Tobias and Robert making a quid, if you >change $100US into Aus$, then its about half the cost of Finale2004!
Well, it's about equal to the price of the Fin2004 upgrade, and 1/6 the retail price of Fin2004. And Tobias and Robert are continually adding new features without charging for them.
Personally, I can't imagine working in Finale without the various free plugins and the ones I've purchased. I can't tell you how many times I've been faced with what I thought was going to be a long and tedious or difficult task in Finale, only to find out that there's a plugin that makes it easy.
And think about the purchase price also in terms of your time. If TGTools saves you a total of just two hours of time, it will pay for itself. And it will save you much more than that. (I think about Finale upgrades the same way. Fin2003 didn't have all that much great, but the Optimize in Groups feature saved me at least 2 hours of work last year, thereby paying for itself.)
Just my $0.02.
Aaron.
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