On 30 Jul 2005 at 16:24, Lon Price wrote: > On Jul 30, 2005, at 2:44 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > If you're going to use a different file for playback, why not just > > save your printable score as MIDI then use a sequencer to tweak > > playback? Why use Finale at all for creating a playback file if > > you're going to fork your playback from the printed score? > > I agree. That's exactly what I do for playback. And when I open > my Finale-generated MIDI file in Digital Performer, all of my repeats > are played correctly (provided I configured them correctly), and HP > creates a tempo map that follows rit. and accel. markings, as well as > fermatas. I can then fine tune the MIDI file, and have it played by > <any> combination of sounds, only limited by my computer's ability to > handle it. Finale will <never> be able to give the user all of the > features that a dedicated sequencer/audio recording program offers. > In my opinion, anyone who thinks they can <ever> do it all in Finale > is just dreaming. And why should you? It's a <notation> program.
Well, I for one HATE sequencers. Thy don't work in any way that corresponds to how I think about music. I cannot get results out of them that make any musical sense, precisely because they are completely divorced from notation, and I do all my thinking about music in notation. To me, notation-based control of playback is *vastly* superior to the way a sequencer works on MIDI data, for the very reason that it corresponds to how the music really works on a human level. When performing you don't think "lessee, here I'll play at key velocity 88 and then gradually increase that to key velocity 101." A musician thinks "I'm going to start this passage forte and crescendo to fortissimo." That's more precise in defining the musical content while being less specific about how to get the job done. The notational version has more information in it. The MIDI version has only a single approach to performing the music in it. Because of that, I do all my prep for MIDI output in Finale, because that's the way I think about music. I would be glad to have better controls for continuous data, but HP makes a lot of that unnecessary as something that has to be handled explicitly (e.g., hairpins and sforzandos come out right without me having to futz with the awful MIDI continuous data editing Finale provides). I'm waiting to hear about the new tempo track to see if it fixes the awful problems with the old tempo tool (it just wasn't reliable, and it also didn't really have a UI that was at all musical). I would much rather set tempos with a graphical line shape and define the starting and ending tempos (or the extremes in between, if it's a s- shaped curve), since that's how I think of tempo. I'd rather do dynamics that way, too, but HP seems to do it well enough that I'll just not worry about it. So, I definitely want to be able to get decent performances out of Finale. I don't expect Finale to be as versatile as a sequencer, nor to incorporate the same tools as one finds in a sequencer (that would be a mistake, since it's oriented to a completely different way of thinking about the music). I see nothing contradictory about those requirements, at least in principle. And I don't think it's all that difficult to get reasonable performance out of Finale, especially with HP doing a lot of good things for you now. -- 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
