--- "David W. Fenton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> That this may very well be true suggests to me one > distressing fact: > > Fewer and fewer people are actually creating music > to be performed by > live musicians. Good computer-based playback means > you don't need > human beings. Yes, problems can arise from this. The plus side is that we'll get to hear the music of a much greater number of musicians. How many musicians have never been able to get their music performed and have thus been missed? Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? Tough to say. But we definitely can guess that technology will only get closer to "human," so I won't spend time worrying about stopping it. Playing instruments and performing will at least for a long time be something people choose to engage in for entertainment. > But then the mixer belongs in your *sequencer*, not > in Finale. The rule for attracting a large audience is "keep it simple." Your average musician doesn't want to work with multiple pieces of software. There's a delicate balance to find. If 80% of the market can be satisfied with only 20% of the functionality (I'm talking about the sequencing stuff here), then that's what to shoot for. MakeMusic is including the most critical 20% of the sequencing features, and with it they'll satisfy most people. Automation is critical too, and Human Playback is actually more helpful to the average user than would be a graphical interface for editing MIDI data - for the simple reason that most people wouldn't use the latter. Finale 2006 already provides by far the best default notation playback of any software in the world. I really want them to press that advantage farther, particularly now that Sibelius has laid its cards on the table for the next two years. > If I were creating my MIDI files for performance on > a single > synthesizer, I certainly wouldn't be using Finale to > tweak it for > performance, mixer or not. It makes no sense to me > to do it that way > for a carefully tuned performance, given that > Finale's tools are just > not designed to make it very easy to do these > things. Right - most professionals don't use Finale for this. But it's apparent after the success of Human Playback and the softsynth in selling Finale 2004 that many people are after instant decent playback more than near-perfect playback that takes tons of tweaking and learning to obtain. When Finale 2004 was released, Sibelius 3 came out with its own set of sounds. What would have been a great advantage for Finale turned into more of a means of maintaining equality. Now Finale will have a clear advantage. Most people will be able to say, "when I write music with Finale, it sounds better than with Sibelius." Regards, Tyler __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
