Tyler Turner wrote:
--- dhbailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Witness Finale's new inclusion of GPO and the
ability to use other
Native Instruments format samples which is far
superior to Sibelius's
formerly superior inclusion of their Kontakt Silver
player. I'll be
very interested to see the new Sibelius version's
playback capabilites
and whether it has improved over Sibelius 3, but it
seems that Sibelius
and Finale are falling over each other in trying to
provide better
playback sounds.
Notion burst onto the scene already having surpassed
them both in that
regard, but unfortunately not even coming close in
notation.
I beg to differ. I understand you beta tested Notion.
I purchased it some time ago myself. But have you used
GPO, specifically with Finale 2006? I've only thus far
entered two of Notion's demo pieces into Finale, note
for note, but they both sound considerably better in
Finale with Finale GPO and Human Playback than they do
in Notion. I had several musicians compare the two to
make sure it wasn't just me who thought so. I'm
talking about untweaked Finale playback.
No, I haven't tried Finale with GPO, since until Finale2006, GPO was an
extra-cost third-party add-on. Notion's sample set shipped with the
program.
As for my having tried Finale2006, it hasn't even shipped yet, so I
don't know why you ask it as if that should have been part of my
comparison. You may be a beta-tester for Finale, or you may simply be
able to score a release copy before the rest of us, but I ordered my
Finale2006 upgrade as soon as it was announced, and I don't have it yet.
So my comments comparing the playback of the two was based on Notion as
it was shipped to betatesters (which anybody could be simply for sending
in an application) and on the currently shipping version of Finale,
which is Finale2005 which does NOT include any GPO samples.
There are some notational elements that Notion loads
specific sound patches that Finale does not. But I
believe the reverse is also true.
Comparing included sounds, Notion has some pretty
severe limitations, such as no solo strings. And since
they sampled the LSO, they share Finale's current
situation of no saxophones. A big difference here is
that because Notion doesn't work with any different
sound sets, even General MIDI, any instrument not
included plays back as piano.
That was part of my opinion that Notion doesn't have much chance of
surviving unless it can do a hell of a lot of upgrading its capabilities
quickly. But my point still stands that when it shipped, the sounds it
played were far superior to the sounds which shipped with the most
recent version of Finale that anybody other than insiders could get
their hands on.
Playback can not be tweaked. It is what it is.
Notationally speaking, I place this program above
NotePad, but significantly under PrintMusic.
I agree -- Notion poses no threat to either Finale or Sibelius on
notational grounds.
Now if Finale and Sibelius could only become more equal in their
capabilities, so that a person could use one of them without drooling
over some aspect of the other program that they can't make use of.
Such as the supposedly superior playback possibilities of Finale2006
(which we'll know for sure, when it finally ships -- currently we only
have your word for it) is wonderful, but once we have the score to the
point where we can get that wonderful playback, we still have to mess
about with Finale's arcane part extraction process and then we are left
with a slew of unlinked extracted parts to deal with should we alter
anything in the score.
Or we can get the score to a wonderful appearance in Sibelius4, complete
with dynamic parts to make part-extraction life easier, but we can't get
the superior playback that Finale2006 offers.
We can only hope that once again, for Sibelius 5 and Finale2007 that the
flip-flop of new features will occur so those version will provide the
consistency of features that we would like now:
Finale2007 will include dynamic parts now that Sibelius4 has them and
Sibelius5 will improve the number of simultaneous playback instruments,
as well as the sample quality, to equal Finale2006's playback capabilities.
But then each program will add some extra new aspect which will keep the
leap-frogging nature of their upgrades, and our continual grumbling
about some neat feature the other program has being lacking in whichever
application we are using.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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