On 7/23/05, Richard Yates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The quality of the engraving isn't in question here - the fact that the > > company participated is. Look at the MakeMusic submission -- it's far > > inferior to the Sibelius submission. I can't even see the notes or the > > staves for the MakeMusic submission! > > You are all reading far more into this informal, voluntary comparison than > is remotely valid. The whole thing was obviously not much planned or > organized. There is no 'MakeMusic' submission; there is only a Finale > version made by a casual user with an ancient version. >
It was *very* informal. After reading more of the replies in the newsgroup, I found out that some of the submissions were done last year & some recently, and the two groups were not given the same instructions. The original question was could people emulate somebody's engraving & use their programs to produce an exact copy. (The first group were done in Score, Music Press and Encore.) I was given the copy & told to use a certain font. I'm not sure what instructions the others were given. The comment from one of the composers on the newsgroup was "Unsuprisingly, they look remarkably alike. The main differences are minute differences in font size and margins." I see more differences than that, especially between the Sibelius & the others, but they are similar, and the piece chosen doesn't really require anything very complicated. Also, the people in the newsgroup are quite a different audience than people here - some may be professional engravers, but many (most?) are performers, students &/or composers. I have a non-music job to pay the bills and study music part time at York University (my main interest is musicology). I know I use a small fraction of what Finale can do, but it's great for what I want. I bought it because I have an on-going project to transcribe a pile of early music into modern notation, and it was just too much to think about doing by hand. I've also ended up doing scores for choirs I've been a part of & doing a couple of scores for a friend who is starting out as a composer. I think the idea of some kind of comparison is a good one, and hope it happens, but that one was not organized or presented in a way that gives much useful information. At a minumum, I would want to know what versions of the programs people were using, and how much of what I was looking at reflected defaults & how much was the result of the user's own templates and tweaking. Perhaps there needs to be two different comparisons - what can experts like some of you on this list make the programs do, and how easy is it for people like me, with a main interest that is something other than engraving, make the program produce the results we need? Given more hours in a day (or a large enough lottery win so that I could leave the job) I could have great fun learning how to use all the bells & whistles (for example I've never done anything with sounds except listen with whatever the default is to help in proofreading), but realistically, if I every needed a really complicated score or a good soundfile, I would probably just hire somebody to do it for me. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
