On 25 Sep 2005 at 23:54, Kurt Gnos wrote: > I use finale as a notation program, not for "real" music. .. .
Well, good for you! > . . . If I was > you, . . . And you're clearly not. > . . . and I would want a decent playback of a Finale file, I would > save it to midi, import it to Nuendo and use some sampler or sampling > software. . . . Well, that isn't going to happen. I'm perfectly happy with my Turtle Beach sound card for demo playback, and the only reason I'm making MP3s of the MIDI files is that I have discovered that hardly anyone has a soundcard or soft synth (except the pros) that sounds even half as good as my cheapo 7-year-old TB Montego II. I don't have the computing power to get into the latest sample sets with their poorly designed players (I simply cannot understand why GPO with the Kontact player should take so damned much RAM when my dedicated TB sound card had not even close to the same amount of memory in it as is easily available in any recent PC) that are so inefficient they won't run reasonably well on multi-gigahertz boxes with gigabytes of RAM. Color me completely unimpressed. If the sounds were so great, it might be worth it, but overall, I am not that impressed with any complete sound sets I've demo'd. Perhaps if you get into the realm of sample sets where you're paying thousands for a family of instruments and have dedicated equipment to process and render them for you it sounds pretty good, but I'm never going to be in that arena. That anyone could be satisfied with sounds as unsatisfactory as the Quicktime Musical Instruments or the Finale Soundfont boggles my mind. From my point of view, those kind of soft synths are an enormous step backwards from the cheap dedicated wavetable synthesizers I've been using on PCs for nearly 10 years now. And because it's not a dedicated DSP processing the sound, you also end up with contention for the computer's CPU which greatly degrades the quality that you can get while doing any multitasking at all. This is, I assume, why those soft synths have such incredibly poor samples, because anything better would be too taxing for standard CPUs. > . . . There are solutions out there, if they are programmed well, > you almost cannot tell wether it's a synth or a real orchestra. (e. g. > film scores.....). . . . Oh, puh-leaze. I can tell a synthesized film score a mile away, not matter how good their samples were. They tend to lard on a huge amount of reverb to try to hide the inadequacy of the basic sound as a substitute for real strings and other real instruments, but anyone who has every listened to live orchestras knows perfectly well that it doesn't sound like the real thing. > . . . And if it's real, you will hear the difference > between mp3 (192) and CD (or SACD) anyway. I don't hear the difference between CDs and SACD, for one. Actually, my 1985 Magnavox oversampling CD player sounds better than my 4-year- old Sony DVD player that plays SACD. >From where I sit, on all of these subjects, the emporer has no clothes more often than not. -- 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
