d. collins wrote: Dennis wrote
If MakeMusic would consider giving us backwards compatibility (at least one version), no one would one have to run that kind of risk. But, after reading the interviews on Jari's site, I realize the chances of seeing this are more than slim. Too bad. Finale is one of the very rare programs to change its format every year and to offer no backwards compatibility.
and I would note that it is innaccurate, at least from a software
engineering standpoint. In computer engineering, there have always been
not one flavor of "Backwards compatibility", but two. One of these, the
ability to read a previous file format, _is_ available, and has been (at
least since 2k, when I first started using it), available in Finale.
The other flavor of backwards compatibility is write compatibility, the
ability to write a file in the previous format. Now, it is possible to
design a program to do this, but it adds significnatly to the
programming complexity, and size of the software to do so, and Coda /
Net4Music / MakeMusic! have never promised (as far as I know) the
ability to write a previous version (though, I would note that when I
was first looking at software packages, Sibelius did promise to maintain
backwards write compatibility, which promise they broke when they
introduced version 2.)
The lack of backwards compatibility is easy enough to deal with,
especially in these days when the smallest hard easily available is at
least 60 GIG: load multiple versions of Finale on the same machine, and
if you need write compatibility with 2000, or 2002, use that version. I
keep 2k loaded on my machine, and use it for everything where I might
want something (a shape for example) in any subsequent version.
ns
And while it is true that the other flavor of backwards compatibility is
not available in Finale,
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