On Mar 3, 2005, at 7:50 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
Actually, I don't care enough about the secrecy of my libraries even if I have spent a lot of time on them, and I DO give them away to anyone who asks, particularly colleagues and students. If they like my settings and copy them, then the world just may be a cleaner, neater, more understandable place for musicians around that person, and I am comfortable with that. I have benefitted from more experienced fellow Finale users sharing their settings, techniques and libraries, and I will freely pass them on for the benefit of the world at large
I concur in this sentiment. I did a lot of work for a client who sells the Finale files outright, so anyone who wants it can get my basic piano-vocal template for five bucks.
Whatever benefit anyone can get by "stealing" my templates, they are welcome to it. I hate that there is so much ugly music out there, and to whatever extent the world is improved by my settings going forth and multiplying, I'm all for it.
Like many on this thread, I doubt that anyone gains much from just copying my template. Things like line thicknesses and tie settings, maybe, but you can probably copy those from someone's Finale help site anyway. I think a lot more of my quality comes from my routine practices, but I'd be just as happy if someone found a way to copy those.
To name just one example, I hate it that a short slur on a second where the further note is on the space but still within the staff -- eg, treble staff A-B beamed together so that both are upstem -- the default slur draws so that the center of its curve lands right over the staff line. Any time this comes up, I have a standard nudge that I do to push the slur up into the space. I think it looks better that way, but hardly anyone else seems to care enough to bother. Maybe I'm just weird and this really isn't worth fixing, but if other engravers were to copy my tweak and start doing it in their scores, too, I would consider that a good thing, not a theft of my work. And likewise for a dozen other standard tweaks I regularly do.
(And wouldn't the world be a better place if everyone ran Patterson Beams on everything?)
mdl
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