Johannes Gebauer wrote:
Tyler Turner schrieb:
Personally, I think GPO is going to be a much bigger
selling point that linked parts. Why? How many times
do composers click play as opposed to extracting
parts? I don't believe part extraction is done as
commonly as some people here believe. It wasn't a
frequent topic on the tech support phones or in
e-mails. It's not commonly discussed on the forum.
When you think about it, if you combine the number of
composers who don't get their works performed with the
number who are composing for something other than an
ensemble (piano, and piano with voice are pretty
common), I'm pretty sure you're looking at over 50%.
And as for people who commonly work with extraction,
that must be a lot fewer.
A few points to be made here:
1) Sibelius already had better playback including a selection of sampled
sounds and the Kontakt player in the last major update, which is a few
years old if I am not mistaken. Finale is only catching up on this one.
2) I actually doubt very much that GPO is such a big selling point at
all. Those who really depend on this kind of playback already have GPO.
Yes they will get slightly better integration, but they will not get any
benefit out of the included library. Those who haven't got GPO yet,
probably don't give this much about it anyway. I joined the GPO group
buy recently, because it meant getting GPO for half the money, but
frankly, I haven't used it much at all, simply because playback is not
very important to me. Nice to have, but I'd much rather save some time
on part extraction.
3) The real point is the direction Finale is heading. Is it going to be
purely for some kind of "Mass Market" (which doesn't exist in this area
anyway) or is it going to be a professional engraving tool. Problem is,
Sibelius has already taken away a lot of the "mass market" and I feel
Finale is trying to get it back. It won't (because a. Sibelius has
managed to get much better product identification than Finale, and b. it
is known to be easier to learn - and it is, I am afraid). Instead Finale
is soon going to loose the pro market as well, unless some of the
decisions are going to be made into a more pro tool. That means bug
fixes, engraving improvements, design improvements (including linked
score and parts). Anything that saves time. Did I mention bug fixes?
[snip]
One other thing Sibelius is light-years ahead of Finale is that version
3 came with the option to save a file as version 2. Version 4 comes
with the ability to save as version 3 or version 2. That means that
Sibelius users can share files among themselves as long as they are
using versions 2, 3, or 4 (that goes back 4 years, I believe) without
resorting to the finale kludges of saving as ETF file and trying to copy
a more recent header section to it, or saving in MusicXML and then
importing into an older version.
Finale has a LOT of catching up to do, if it hopes to regain the lead in
the notation software market!
GPO integration isn't enough to do it by itself, and that really seems
to be the single big improvement in Finale2006 (besides the Textured
Paper, that is.)
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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