I long ago gave up making quixotic principled stands in the computer business. The business changes too quickly, and there is too much else more important to concern myself with. But I am very sympathetic to Dennis's point of view. For this reason, I always assume that some day in the future I will no longer be able to edit my Finale files, or at least not without great expense and difficulty. (Indeed, this is already effectively true for my oldest Finale files. And then there are those files from Professional Composer and Deluxe Music Construction Set!)
For me the final product is the PDF and/or the hard copy. The hard copy is certainly isolated from abusive copy protection or corporate bankruptcy, but it is vulnerable to fire and flood and the like, as well as toner breakdown and paper rot. At this point I am counting on the ubiquity of PDF to isolate it from anything its parent, Adobe, may throw at it. While this hope may be misplaced, I think it has good odds, and it is the most reliable practical digital archiving format I can see at the moment. From: Dennis Bathory-Kitsz > My and my > clients' scores are too important to me to entrust to a corporation's ill > will _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
