Darcy James Argue wrote:
On 29 Jul 2005, at 8:03 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
If HP works with any GM synthesizer, what's the advantage of GPO,
then?
1) Apparently opinions differ here, but I think GPO sounds are clearly
*far* superior to the Finale SoundFont, especially the wind, ensemble
strings, and percussion instruments. I agree the solo strings are weak,
but so are the solo strings in the Finale soundfont (especially the
awful new solo violin in the 2006 soundfont). I suspect a lot of people
who say the Finale soundfont is just as good as GPO have terrible
computer speakers. (I have a pair of M-Audio BX5 studio monitors, and
the difference is really dramatic.)
So now we need to buy $400 studio monitor speakers in addition to
upgrading our processors and RAM to get the benefits of this aspect of
the upgrade?
I can listen to CDs on my computer and they sound fine and very
realistic (I have a subwoofer and two fairly nice satellite speakers).
When I play GPO vs. soundfonts there isn't any noticeable improvement
with GPO (with the limited testing I've done so far) over the same
Finale file played through the soundfont. Both sound much more
synthetic than my CDs sound.
From all the hoopla I would have expected to hear an enormous
difference in playback of the same file between the GPO and the
soundfont, and I don't hear that (apparently I'm not alone in this.)
If Finale really wants to impress us, they should have shared some demo
files which would have said (through example not just marketing brochure
double-speak) "THIS is how fantastic your files can sound!" I see no
such samples on my installation disk nor in any folders on my computer,
and when I playback a file with the two different playback methods I
hear no improvement, just different tonal quality.
And neither comes close to the Kurzweil PC2r that I have.
As to why Finale can't use VST along with traditional midi output under
Windows while other programs can do that, probably the reason lies
somewhere in a stack next to the reason why Finale can't do EPS export
under Windows while other music programs can.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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