On 31 Jul 2005 at 1:38, Simon Troup wrote: > > 1. I think it's a mistake to provide that improvement by tying > > Finale to a particular technology, one that requires Finale to know > > the insides of the technology chosen, instead of treating it like a > > black box with an interface like every equivalent technology. > > Like MIDI you mean, we have that already, and access to as much > hardware sampling or MIDI based software sampling that you can afford > to throw your money at.
No, we *don't* already have that. We have lesser built-in features in regard to HP with anything other than the technology that MakeMusic has chosen to build extra features for. My point is that there ought to be an abstraction layer in HP that allows you to configure these things for *any* synthesizer and soundset that supports the functionality that HP now has hard-wired for GPO in particular. > > 2. I also think it's a mistake to choose a technology that is so > > resource-intensive as to not even run on a lot of the hardware out > > there that is running current versions of Finale just fine. > > Good sampling is resource intensive, just like the most true to life > games require the most up to date graphics cards, the same is true of > samplers. MIDI and soundfonts are there for anyone with an older > machine, just as games have ways of switching off everything from > shadows to fog, and include switches to lower resolution. There are a couple of issues here: 1. where are the resources are coming from, your CPU or a dedicated processor in a hardware device? 2. why is GPO/NI/Kontakt player so much more resource-intensive than other software-based synthesizers? At least, that's what I've heard, that other software soundset standards do not have such extreme hardware requirements. The problem for me here is that MakeMusic has settled on a technology that is proprietary and also very resource-intensive. That means you have to have high-end hardware to use what Finale provides by default, and if you've already invested in something that works just as well sound-wise with your existing older hardware, then you get none of the benefits of the HP integration with GPO. You have a Hobson's choice here, either go with what someone else has chosen for you, or simply give up all these nice new features. That may be something that Mac users are accustomed to, but on the PC side, it's anathema. I, for one, don't like being restricted in one area based on choices made in a different area. I would like to see HP opened up so that it could work better with non-GPO synthesizers (software or hardware), insofar as those synthesizers supported the advanced features. If HP were abstracted as a layer of features that you would set up to interface with your particular synthesizer, then that would mean you would not be giving up features by using something other than GPO. Of course, this isn't really a GPO criticism. It's a criticism of what I understand to be the design of HP, which seems to me to be a black box with no end user control beyond the very general parameters that have been given to us. For instance, there is no way to tell HP to recognize a turn figure other than the ones provided in Finale's fonts, despite the fact that these are not exhaustive. Likewise, there is no way to have pizzicatto realized automatically unless you use an output destination that Finale already understands (the Finale soundfont or GPO; I'm assuming it doesn't work with GM, and wouldn't work with synthesizers that have individual pizzicato samples for each of the instruments). All of this could be solved by opening up HP to make into something where you could control how each of the items it recognizes are realized in a particular synthesizer. Ideally, you could have different HP setups for different output sources, so you could mix and match sounds from various synthesizers. -- 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
