On 8 Jul 2005 at 18:16, Ken Durling wrote: > At 12:39 PM 7/8/2005, you wrote: > >And my main objection was that I could never figure out, once the > >music was entered, how to (in Finale terms): > > > >1. change the page percentage OR > > > >2. change the system percentage > > > >The music was TOO BIG. I wanted it smaller. I couldn't figure out a > >way to do that. And the result was something I'd never show anyone > >else, because it looked like a kindergarten exercise. > > Objection overruled. Don't blame Sibelius for what you don't know how > to do. This is a very basic setting under Layout > Document Setup> > Staff Size. I don't know Finale well enough to know exactly what is > meant by "page percentage" but I suspect that it's under House Styles> > Engraving Rules> Staves> Justify when ____% full? I could be wrong.
I posted about this later on. The UI for adjusting these things in Sibelius is buried in dialog boxes, whereas the UI in Finale is based on right clicking on things displayed onscreen, or dragging margin lines, or by using one of the standard tools. While the Finale methods have their drawbacks in terms of some loss of precision if you only try to drag things around onscreen (instead of using the tools that allow precise settings), in Sibelius, I could see no way to visually see the settings I was changing, except to visit a dialog box, make the changes and then close the dialog (yes, one of the dialogs had a preview, but it was too small to be entirely eliminate the need to close the dialog to see the results). I also find simple page navigation very frustrating. How do I move right in the page display? [typed later:] Well, I've discovered that there are scrollbars that can be turned on (don't know why they're off!) and that you can click on the navigation palette in a special way to navigate from page to page, but this does not feel at all comfortable to me. I cannot seem to position the view window successfully where I want it. That is, I can't seem to figure out the relationship of the position of the mouse click to where the view window ends up. I mucked around quite a while with a MusicXML imported file and there were a whole host of problems in the conversion (I'm not blaming that on Sibelius), and I had a devil of a time figuring out how to fix them. Here's a couple: 1. the first time I imported, I let Sibelius choose the instruments. It chose orchestral strings instead of the solo sounds. I never was able to figure out how to change the playback to use solo string patches instead of orchestral. 2. the piece being imported had independent key signatures, but only in the final movement. The problem was that the key signature change in the piano part for the second movement was missed (it's only the piano that has independent time sigs). Now, I have no way of telling if this is a MusicXML problem or not (the file won't re-import into Finale, giving me a DTD error), but I don't really care about that. My concern was with how to fix it. And because of Sibelius's page view orientation, it was extremely hard for me to reliably select measures to transpose. 3. the cello part had some sections in treble clef. I didn't expect to get the right performance from a MusicXML import, but in giving a look, I couldn't quite figure out how to get the treble clef passage to play an octave below notated (it didn't come out right with an ETF import, either). 4. playback was very annoying. I wanted the view to be 2-page view, but every time I started playback, it switched back to 100% (or some larger percentage), which made it very, very difficult to follow playback. Ah -- I see there's a setting that was set to always play back at 75%. 5. I tested their version of "Human Playback" and found that the default settings were best (espressivo with basically no rubato). But I don't like certain interpretations of how the shape of lines should be interpreted, specifically, any time a line has a disjunction (say, a leap up an octave) the first note after the leap is accented. That's musically *awful* for just about any style I can think of. 6. I also just tried ETF import, and it's not too bad, actually. But now the tempo is wrong. For some reason the MusicXML import got the right tempo, but ETF doesn't. I can't for the life of me figure out where on the menus to go to change the playback tempo, or the definition of the Allegro Vivace at the beginning (which is stuck at H = 50, instead of H = 78 as in my original). OK, I've figured it out that I can recreate my tempo marking as part of the Text Dictionary, and I did that. But in creating it, I made the mistake of defining it as Q = 78 (instead of half). Now I'm trying to edit it, and there seems to be no way to change from quarter to half as the tempo pulse. OK, so I'll double 78 and use 156. Well, I try selecting 78 and typing over it -- no go. So I try backspacing. It deletes some of it, but not all. It looks like the only way I can reliably change the tempo is to use a spinner control! ACK!! That's HORRID user interface design. But at least I was able to fix it. Yes, I had to use a method of data input that I HATE using, and yes, I couldn't change the quarter note to half note after the dictionary entry was created, but I was able to get what I needed. Now that I know these things, it shouldn't be a problem again, but why the UI is so NON-STANDARD, and why something that was user-set in the first place should not be editable, I can't say. None of these things look "intuitive" from where I sit! 7. somehow the import got my Finale score (a piano quartet), which had 3 systems per page, into 3 systems on the lefthand page and 1 system on the righthand page (with the exception of one page that has four systems on it, vertically overlapping). Now, I understand that these are import problems and I'm not going to blame Sibelius for failing to get an ETF import perfect (though the logic of how it could mess this up escapes me). I finally just removed all the existing before-staff and after-staff spacing and let Sibelius space the staves itself, and that was pretty much OK. I could work with it, once I figured out how it's done. 8. responsiveness of the UI on my 500MHz P4 with 768MBs of RAM is ABYSMAL. Everything is extremely slow. Playback in Sibelius's page view gets way ahead of Sibelius's ability to redraw the screen. Finale does a far better job of this (playback in page view). Also, Finale is more intelligent about positioning the currently-playing system, as well, so that I'm not constantly needing to scan around the screen looking for where the playback point is currently. 9. the playback controls are dreadful. I had a terrible time setting the thing to start a point where I wanted to play from, because the slider controls were too small, or because the incremental move worked by beats instead of measures. Also, I could never get my tempo markings to work correctly -- I thought I'd licked that one by figuring out the dictionary thing, but I couldn't seem to make it work consistently in all the ones I tried after the first successful one. 10. the automatic interpretation of repeats was pretty sad. In several sections, it kept repeating the same section over and over again (I have no idea why). Anyway, that's enough for now. Most of the notational aspects I could probably figure out how to configure, but I find the user interface is, overall, really poorly done, with lots of places where it's extremely hard to find how to control things (they just aren't located anywhere on any of the menus that would make sense to me). Also, there seems to be very little in the way of context-sensitive menus. I would expect that if I right click on a text expression I'd get some shortcuts to commands that are specific to the type of object I'm clicking on, but there's nothing there. In this respect, Finale is much better (though you have to be in the right tool for it to work). I'm less concerned about layout now than I am about things that I just could not for the life of me figure out how to change. Layout I could live with having it be a bit stricter than Finale's. But I felt very restricted by the page layout view. I didn't get around to trying the dynamic parts (the name of which I see they've trademarked!). I'll maybe do that over the weekend. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
