DAMN.
This thing is fast. Like, *really* fast. Even on my antiquated hardware. Dragging around the screen is seamless, and of course everything draws instantly as you drag, no redraws. Playback happens automatically, with no delay, and you can drag around the screen during playback. Some things are still a little slow, like dragging slurs -- but those are slow in FinMac2004 as well.
Sibelius has long been an absolute dog on the Mac, and the speed boost in this new version is frankly stunning. Good for them.
I hope Coda's paying attention. This is the kind of speed we need in Fin2005 for OS X.
Also, earlier, someone mentioned that they believed that the speed improvements in Sib 3.x were due to its use of Quartz Extreme. At the time, I said I didn't think this was the case, because Quartz Extreme didn't affect redraws, only scrolling. I now believe I was mistaken. Here's why:
I have a little experiment for anyone with a Mac, OS X, and Quartz Extreme-compatible graphics card. Download the Sibleius 3.1.1 demo (if you don't already own Sibelius). Open up a large score -- the "Fanfare 2000" file in "Example Scores/Orchestral" is good. Try dragging around the screen (you click and drag to move the screen in Sibelius). This should be relatively speedy, depending on your hardware. My own Mac is farily long in the tooth, so it's not smooth like the buttah on the muffins or anything, but given the size of the score, it's bloody impressive.
Now, from the View menu, select "Smoothing... " and drag the slider all the way to the left, to "None." In other words, you are turning *off* smoothing. You would expect this to give you a performance *boost*, right?
Wrong. At least on my machine, turning off smoothing resulted in painfully, unusably slow scrolling. In fact, this is exactly what scrolling used to be like on previous versions of Sibelius.
Turn Smoothing back on again -- even at the lowest possible level, as long as it's above "None" -- and we're back to speedy scrolling. Weird, right?
So what gives?
I think what Sibelius is doing here is storing the *entire* score -- every page -- as a 2D texture in Quartz Extreme. I forget how big a texture can be, so for larger scores, I guess you would actually need multiple textures, but a 32 MB graphics card can store a *lot* of 2D textures. This way, the entire score is cached in the video card and no redrawing is required. It's like you had a really long table with every score page sitting on it. That's what's stored on the graphics card. The Sibelius window is like a magnifying glass, and you're just moving the magnifying glass left and right, up and down, and closer and further away from the score. All of those movements are effectively instantaneous, because the whole thing is stored on the graphics card and those transformations are a piece of cake for a modern ATI or nVidia GPU.
To use a different analogy:
You might not be a gamer, but surely everyone's at least seen a 3D first-person shooter like Quake or Unreal or whatever. So imagine you're playing Quake. You are in a room with a really long wall, and on that wall is your entire Sibelius score. You can move left or right in the room to see different portions of the score. You can move closer to the wall to see the score in more detail, or you can back away from the wall to see the big picture. We'll also assume that you can fly -- that way, you can fly up to the top of the wall to see the woodwinds, or fly back down to the bottom to see the strings.
The reason you can move around like this in a first-person 3D shooter, without a massive lag when the screen redraws, is because all of these transformations are done by the graphics card, which is specifically designed to be very, very good at this sort of thing. I'm almost entirely sure that's what Sibelius 3 for OS X is doing, and it's brilliant. It lets the graphics card do almost all of the redrawing, freeing the CPU for other tasks (like playback, etc). There is no redrawing because the entire score is cached in the graphics card.
This implementation was a natural for Sibelius, since it has no "scroll view" or "page view" -- in other words, you are always in that room with your score printed on the long wall. But there's no reason why it couldn't work in Finale, as well. Scroll view is the room with the long wall. And each page in Page View is a separate room, with a page-shaped wall. Viewing multiple pages in Page view would be more like the "long wall" room in Sibelius.
I really hope Coda is on top of this. Sibelius have used this technology to earn a *massive* performance boost in OS X. SIb 3.1.1 is far faster on my machine than Sib 2 or Sib 1.4 ever were, even in OS 9. This type of graphics card-enhanced drawing is only possible in OS X. If Coda do it right, Fin2005 Mac will be *faster* in OS X than OS 9.
Imagine that.
- Darcy
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn NY
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