On 8 Jul 2005 at 23:34, Ken Durling wrote: > At 09:55 PM 7/8/2005, David Fenton wrote:
[] > >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 never use the navigation palette or the scroll bars. I'm entirely > comfortable with a combination of click and drag and page up/down. Well, on my system, click and drag is not easily controllable. I don't know if it's a screen redrawing issue, or a mouse issue, or if my system is just too slow, but I can' reliably drag to where I want to (i.e., the drag never moves the score as far as I moved my mouse), and this is extremely uncomfortable. PageUp/Down do nothing at all except move me vertically within the currently displayed window. I can't see how to navigate horizontally except by scrollbars (which makes it pretty hard to position things, unless I set it to display one or two page widths, which is either too big or too small). [] > >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%. > > You can set this however you want it, even no zoom, where I have it > set. Well, it was just a case where there was a setting that needed to be changed. I do kind of understand the utility of it for someone who wants to playback at a fixed size. I prefer to *work* at a fixed size and don't really want playback to alter that. I only use larger sizes in Finale for final layout, when I'm checking exact placement of items like expressions, etc. Of course, I broke my own rule for new applications -- you should always browse through the options dialogs to see what things you can change. I probably wouldn't have realized the problem going through it, but I would have remembered the setting when I ran into the to-me inexplicable behavior. > >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. > > If you look to Sibelius as a playback program, . . . Well, I don't look at Finale as a playback program, but it does what I need. I'm not certain yet that Sibelius does, except with a very annoying UI that I think is bad even in sequencers. > . . . I think you're barking > up the wrong tree. And the above behavior sounds more like a problem > with your sound module than Sibelius - mine does no such accents on > wide leaps. And playback is what you're criticizing - at least many > here are - Finale for pursuing. It's a notation program. I am really > pleased so much was implemented in this upgrade that directly > addresses engraving. Well, I need playback in Finale to prep files for MIDI, since I am wedded to notation as my method for creating MIDI performances. And I don't want to have to repeatedly edit the MIDI file after exporting it from Finale -- I want as much as possible done in Finale. And I'm not asking for perfection -- just something that's good enough for general MIDI files to play on anyone's synthesizer (because of that, I don't tweak things overly carefully, like setting much in the way of balance between instruments, since I don't know what sounds they'll be playing back on). I liked certain things about the Sibelius "live playback," but there was definitely an accent on the top notes. It's not a problem with my sound module, either, because it doesn't happen anywhere else -- it's something that Sibelius is specifically choosing to do to the performance before it sends it to the synthesizer. It's not a huge thing, though it would mean I'd never use it. And, to be fair, I haven't really heard Finale's Human Playback. I might be equally dissatisfied with it. My concern was that someone implemented into Sibelius's idea of how music should sound an idea that is antithetical to everything I've ever been taught about musicality. [] > >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. > > I've never had a problem with screen redraw. My slowest machine is > 866Mhz, my fastest 3.2Ghz. Redraw is fine at 866, even for a full > symphonic score. (I've never heard of a P4 that slow. Are you sure > it's not a P3?) . . . It was one of the very first P4s, purchased in 3rd quarter 1999. > . . . My 866 is. I don't know what caused this on your > machine, but not a complaint that's heard on the Sibelius list. Well, Finale doesn't have any of these problems, so for me, the Sibelius is not an improvement over Finale. I also have no other programs that have screen redraw problems, so it's clearly something specifict to Sibelius. > >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. > > I don't quite understand this complaint. . . . The complaint is that the natural methods for me to use in doing playback don't work in Sibelius. > . . . Just click on a note where > you want it to start and hit either P or the space bar. (the same > commands are in most DAWs) . . . Well, I didn't know that. Also, it would be helpful if the visual feedback were better. For one, I don't like the layer colors Sibelius uses -- the blue for layer 1 is so dark I can't distinguish it clearly from black noteheads (I couldn't find anywhere to change the layer colors), nor can I distinguish the color change that means "this notehead is selected." Therefore, I was getting back no visual feedback that clicking somewhere would start the playback from there. To me, if that's the case, you should be able to have the playback controls palette pick that up from the UI, rather than requiring a set of keyboard commands that As to the commands being the same as in "most DAWs," I don't even know what a "DAW" is, but I also don't use sequencers much, because I DON'T LIKE THEM. They don't work the way I conceive of music, and so I find all the assumptions behind the UI design counter-productive. One principle of good UI design is that you don't depend on your user's knowledge of another program and the conventions of a class of programs for functionality -- in a GUI application you always should have discoverability, so that someone who doesn't know the commands should be able to find them (without looking them up in the help files). In Finale, I don't have to know the keyboard shortcuts to be able to launch playback from a particular location, since Finale's playback controls show measure number and tempo as editable textboxes, not as display-only. BTW, this is also a complaint I have about sequencers I've used -- they work exactly the same (wrong) way. > . . . Either the whole score, a single stave or > any combination of staves. It will start from that point. Thereafter > P will return to marker, and space will pause and resume. (This is > new) You can enter a metronome marking anywhere you want (Alt-C-X-M > then right click) and as many as you want and hide them if you really > want to control playback. . . . How? I don't know how to create a metronome marking. I can choose your sequence of commands, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to type to get a valid metronome mark. Q=158? If I go to the Sibelius Demo help file (which is remarkably stupidly provided as a phenomenally slowly-loading Java applet, instead of either as a Windows Help File or as HTML, and one that even more stupidly copies the horrid interface of Windows HTML Help), I get no help on this topic. But I do find that Q=158 actually works. The problem, of course, is that I'd *never* want that appearing in a score -- I'd want the quarter note symbol. I haven't a clue how to insert that. Likewise, the real thing that should be happening is that I should be able to define my tempo markings (like Allegro Vivace) to control tempo. I understand the concept of the dictionary (I think), but can't seem to get it to work reliably in having tempos set by them. > . . . Ctrl-right or left arrow will move you > measure by measure where plain arrow goes note to note - just like > the old Wordstar command. Pretty basic. Wordstar! I haven't used Wordstar since the 80s, and it wouldn't at all occur to me as a model for navigation commands for playback. The problem here is not the keyboard commands, but the lack of clear visual feedback to tell me where the playback is going to begin. I also had frequent problems with playback beginning with only one part, when I wanted to hear all. I got around this by selecting all four staves, but why did 5-staff playback stop? I don't know. Obviously I clicked in some fashion that changed the setting, but for the life of me, I see nothing onscreen that indicates that change. > >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). > > Again, without looking at specific contexts, I have no idea why - this > is not a common complaint. It didn't happen in all cases, but one minuet and trio repeated the B section of the trio 5 times before going on (it missed the repeat back to the minuet, but I assume I could tell it what to do there). In another case, a piece with one 20-bar passage repeated played the passage 3 times before I stopped it and restarted playback from after the repeat mark. > >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). > > Again, just because YOU can't find them doesn't mean they're poorly > done. Whoever expects to learn a complex program with an hour or two > over the demo? Have you ever gotten into Photoshop?? And Finale is > notorious for unintiutive UI. I find Sibelius far more intuitive, but > I've also put thousands of hours into it, just as you have into > Finale. Calling Sib's UI "really poorly done" smacks of gratuitous > iconoclasm, I have to say. It's clear that many disagree, even > seasoned Finale users here. I spent about 3 hours working on this yesterday, on top of having worked extensively with the Sibelius 3 demo about a year ago. Back then I concentrated on entering new music, this time I'm concentrating on reformatting music imported from Finale (since I can't save, it gives me something to work on, rather than having to repeatedly recreate the same entry data). I've browsed all the menus. I've looked at them from the standpoint of what topic I'm interested in. I've browsed them in general, just to get the lay of the land. I still cannot see where many settings are located. Perhaps some of them are hidden behind function names that aren't immediately meaningful to me (you have to know a lot to understand that DICTIONARY controls an awful lot of playback aspects). But the definition of "intuitive" is that you can "intuit" how to do things without needing to read a manual or be trained by someone else. Finale is criticized for not being intuitive, and in many respects I'd agree. But I don't see Sibelius as being any more intuitive -- just like any complex program, there's nothing obvious about it, you have to figure it out. > >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. > > Try Ctrl/Alt - P for Properties. This used to be integral to the > keypad, but is now - since V.3 - separate. Again, here's a non-standare UI. Properties should be accessible from the context menu. This is a case where Sibelius's design seems to have chosen explicitly to be *non-intuitive*, since it uses keyboard commands that no other program that I know of uses, and so far as I can see, exposes no menu commands that duplicate that command. Ah, yes, I saw the properties panel at some point, but could not figure out how it related to particular objects. It seems very badly designed, as it is not context-sensitive, having the same categories for every object, whether applicable or not. This means it's impossible to know by looking which things one can change and which things one can't. For instance, my Finale tempo marking is list under TEXT as "Finale Expression 7" but I can't change it to a tempo, even if the text of it is in the playback dictionary. Also, I have major problems with understanding where my typing is going when I do something like Ctrl-Alt-T (to insert text) -- there is no onscreen indicator of where the text is going to appear, and there is a huge pause between my typing and the actual appearance of the text onscreen. There just isn't enough visual feedback here for me to be able to understand what's going on. > >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. > > Did you try the various rulers in the View menu? There is a staff > ruler that might be closer to what you seek. Yes, I tried that, but those weren't draggable, as I'd hoped. Or, at least, *I* couldn't get them to be draggable. > Learning the default and customizing keyboard shortcuts is one of the > real keys to Sibelius, and the manual has always emphasized this. > Mouse navigation and entry is far inferior. A program that has many of its commands accessible *only* through keyboard commands does not deserve the reputation of being "intuitive." > Sib's UI is not dreadful Far from it. It works wonderfully and is > very flexible. But it takes tine to learn. . .. In other words, Sibelius's reputation for having an intuitive user interface is unearned. > . . . I'm still trying to find > time to pursue finding my way around Finale better. Neither program > is perfect, and layout is one of the tougher issues in Sibelius. But > I'm not going to call either program awful because I just haven't > learned how to use it! . I'm trying out Sibelius from a number of points of view: 1. I am often asked about whether someone should use Finale or Sibelius. I have believed the propaganda about Sibelius's "intuitive" UI, but now I know, it's just not true. Indeed, I think it's worse than Finale in terms of discoverability, because there are tons of commands that are not even on the menus or accessible via toolbars. 2. I am dissatisfied with Finale, as a long-term user (since 1991, WinFin 2.01), and am looking for something that produces better results with less work. So far, I see note input as harder in Sibelius, and layout seems about equal (ignoring, for the moment, the new dynamic parts, which I haven't yet tried out to see if I could make it work for me). I see major UI problems with inability to examine and change properties based on visual navigation -- too much is dialog-box based editing, rather than being more closely tied to the object itself. This is a criticism that I've often levelled at Finale, but Sibelius seems much worse to me. And I just don't think the onscreen visual feedback is good at all -- I can't for the life of me tell what the hell is going on at any point, and the sluggishness of everything makes it pretty difficult to use. There are also small details of the UI (like the badly designed dictionary editing interface) that are horridly difficult to use, both nonstandard and broken (try scrolling horizontally while in edit mode and you'll see what's broken!). 3. I have a host of files in Finale and want to know what converting them would entail. I haven't decided yet, though I've figured out that many, many things just have to be redone (not even mentioning the things like crescendos that don't even import), such as tempo markings (why can't Sibelius recognize a Finale expression that affects tempo as a tempo mark and insert it into the playback dictionary with the appropriate tempo setting?). I have basically concluded that I would never under any circumstances convert files from Finale -- I'd just retain the last version of Finale and edit/print from that if I were to switch to Sibelius for new work. So, I was really prepared this time around to like Sibelius, but there are just way too many things that are part of the basic philosophy of the designers of the Sibelius UI that I see as antithetical to good UI design. These include: 1. lack of discoverability 2. use of keyboard shortcuts that have no corresponding menu command 3. use of non-standard keyboard commands with a corresponding failure to use Windows-standard UI conventions (e.g., no Properties choice on the context menu) 4. controls that don't work right (e.g., the tempo editing text control in the playback dictionary which does not allow direct typing after the item has been saved, and which is unreliable during the creation of the dictionary item). 5. sluggishness of screen redraw. 6. lack of clear onscreen indications of what's selected, where the playback is going to start from, etc. There are many things I like, such as the little dotted lines that tell you what certain things are attached to, and the various ruler settings. But overall, I think the emperor has no clothes when it comes to the supposed user interface advantages of Sibelius compared to Finale. I'm still going to look at the dynamic parts this weekend, but for now, I am not tempted in the slightest to switch to Finale. -- 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
