Darcy,
I am not saying that the setup wizard with GPO doesn't work at all, and
perhaps even have certain benefits in some situations. However, I am
saying it is a step backwards from how it worked before, and it is a
total nuissance to me (and I am pretty sure to others as well) who use
Finale _primarily_ for engraving, and see GPO playback as an addition
for relatively little used playback.
On 18.12.2005 Darcy James Argue wrote:
> Sure, but with numerous problems:
> 1) After I leave the wizard, Finale will actually load all those
instruments, which takes a long time if it is a large ensemble.
Not as long as having to load them all manually! Load, wait; load,
wait, load, wait; etc. At least they load all at once, and without
further input from you. You could go get a cup of coffee, or browse
the web for a few minutes.
Yes, my point is though, I don't have any of this waiting time the way I
do it. I don't even want to know about GPO at that stage. I am only
concerned with the engraving part, and not with playback, and I don't
want to be, either. GPO, imo, is not that good anyway, and when I really
need it I have to spend time with it anyhow.
However, I agree that Finale needs to offer more control about when
GPO instruments are loaded.
And it needs to change the wizard's approach, so you start with the
instruments, not with how the instruments sound.
> 2) I have no way to influence the panning: For classical setups I
want the 2nd violins on the right, not on the inside left, to give
just one example. So I will have to come back to the instruments
regardless.
Same problem whether you load manually or with the wizard. At least
if you load using the setup wizard, you get *some* kind of panning by
default -- manually loaded instruments default to dead center.
No, actually, they don't! I just tried it, and they default to exactly
the same panning as they would if I set them up with the wizard. Try it.
> 3) My main problem is that if I choose two violins, I get Violino 1
and Violino 2, not Violino I and Violino II. I have not found any
way to change this, and it means I will have to re-edit them all the
time. Which is a large step backwards from how the wizard worked for
me before.
Yes, I understand the problem, but how long does that take to change?
Too long compared to how it worked before.
> 4) I don't think there is a flexible way to have things like Basso,
Basso continuo etc appear as choices in the wizard. When I looked
at the GPOinstruments.txt file I could not see how I could edit it
in this way.
If there's a GPO instrument you don't normally use (perhaps one of
the organs, or even one of the non-KS cellos?) you could edit it.
That's ridiculous.
But
again, in large scores, changing the staff name and/or attributes
for a handful of staves is still *much* faster than loading an
entire orchestra one instrument at a time.
Yes, but still much faster than if you don't load the instruments at all.
>> Trust me, from experience, it's *much* faster to use the Setup
Wizard to set up the GPO instruments for a full orchestral score
than it is to load each instrument individually. (Where you have to
wait for each instrument to load into RAM before the next one
loads, etc.)
But it is still much faster to set up a score without GPO than to set it
up with the GPO wizard. That's all I am saying. I _don't_ want to worry
about GPO when I am setting up a score, it's only in the way anyway,
besides, it eats memory, and my laptop gets so hot it becomes
uncomfortable for my hands.
>
>
> I have to wait for each instrument to load into RAM anyway, after I
leave the wizard, which is definitely the time where I do not want
to wait. So I leave it until I actually need playback.
If you load GPO instruments manually, you have to use the Kontakt
Player interface (which is terrible) to load the first instrument.
Then wait. Then click the second slot, find the instrument you want
in the Kontakt Player, select it, and wait. And repeat, and repeat,
and repeat. It's *much* faster to have the Setup Wizard load all the
instruments at once -- the interface is far superior, and since you
aren't forced to sit there while each individual instrument loads.
Again, see above. I am forced to worry about something when I really
have no patience to deal with it at all.
If you manually load any nonpitched percussion instruments, you will
have to edit the channel in the Kontakt Player.
I never work with percussion other than very simple timps or the like,
so that's not really of interest.
If you load more than 8 instruments, you need to use several Kontakt
player instances.
True. Again, since I don't set up GPO at all at that stage I couldn't
care less.
You will also need to edit the Finale channels in the instrument list.
Yes, but that's just another shortcoming of the Finale GPO implementation!
You will have to manually set the panning for the entire orchestra,
instead of having a set of intelligent defaults to work with.
No, you won't. It still uses the default panning.
Bottom line -- it can take up to ten minutes to configure a full
orchestral score for GPO playback when loading instruments manually.
It takes about a minute to do the same work using the Setup Wizard.
Plus ten minutes to correct all the errors it makes (like Violino 1
etc), plus all the time needed to find the missed errors in the printed
out scores. That's actually one of my biggest concerns. I used the GPO
wizard twice, and each time I missed wrongly spelled instrument names
until the proof-reading.
Since you generally only work with smaller ensembles, and you require
more customization than the average user, I'm perfectly willing to
accept that the Setup Wizard might not be a good choice -- for *you*.
But anyone using who wants GPO playback for a full orchestra will
find the Setup Wizard invaluable.
The setup wizard is a perfectly good choice for me, it's the GPO part of
it which is ruined by bad design.
> I know there is space for user error, but I don't see this as a
problem once you know you have to load the notation instruments. You
could equally well forget to load the KS instruments in the wizard,
and not know until you hear them, no?
There is a visible difference between KS and non-KS instruments --
they have different names. The non-notation instruments have exactly
the same names as the notation instruments, so it's easy to load the
wrong one without realizing it.
You are splitting hairs. The visible difference is only visible in the
Kontakt player, which you actually won't see in the whole setup process.
Otherwise the visible difference when doing the setup is marginal, one
has a different name, the other is in a different folder. I don't see
this as an argument. And on the whole it is just another bit of bad
design. Finale should only see the notation instruments anyway.
>> On the other hand, if you are using a substitute instrument for
GPO playback (like organ instead of voice, for instance), it's
trivially easy to make a staff name change after the fact.
> Except that Organ will create three staff systems and mess up your
grouping. Good example, Darcy.
Oh come on. It's trivially easy to just delete the extra staves, and
then the other staves respace automatically. Or if this is really
such a big deal, pick a different instrument to substitute for voice
-- solo flute, say.
And mess up your grouping. And if you forget to sort that out before you
optimize you can end up in real trouble. Been there, done it. I have
totally had it with the GPO wizard, and this is largely responsible that
I use GPO very rarely.
At that stage of setting up a score it is a total nuissance for me. The
whole idea of the wizard is completely defeated if you have to go back
and change every instrument manually. No better than the old setup
before the wizard was first invented.
> In fact, when I start a score I don't even know whether I will ever
play it back, let alone use GPO (which will choke with a full
orchestra anyway on my computer, and take ages to load in every
session, at least when I need playback.
Well then clearly, for *you*, using GPO instruments in the Setup
Wizard isn't the way to go! But for someone who definitely wants and
needs GPO playback, it's a different story.
But it could be indefinitely better and more universal, had some person
in the GUI design department done their job properly. It could have been
great, but it's just a large amount of work arounds.
You work in a totally different field from what I do. I realize that,
and I am sure it works ok for you (although I cannot believe that you
find the current GPO wizard perfect), however, from my point of view it
is a very large step in the wrong direction. I have customized the
instruments.txt file to quite some extend to save time when setting up
scores, and all of that is lost.
Johannes
--
http://www.musikmanufaktur.com
http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de
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