Owain Sutton wrote:
You never know, they might take the bull by the horns and sort out the
whole 'nonstandard key signature' embarassment...
(Hands up who's seen me on this topic before ;) )
Owain
PS Am I right in thinking Sibelius 4 has a fully-functional
implementation of quarter-tones? I.e. one that people can actually
use....I'm still trying to figure out playback in Finale.
Sib4 has a plug-in which will go through and insert hidden midi commands
to get proper playback of quartertones. I don't work with them so I
can't vouch for how good it is, but the manual for Sib4 does mention
that the plug-in comes with a Help file which indicates what will
happen, how to use it, and explains its limitations, so apparently there
are some limitations. Running the plug-in just now I find that
unfortunately I can't simply copy and paste the contents of the help
screen, but essentially it says that any combination of the 4
quarter-tone accidentals in a single part will be handled correctly, but
mixtures of the quartertone and semitone accidentals won't be handled
correctly. It also states that any mixture of quarter-tone accidentals
and semi-tone accidentals in separate parts which share the same channel
will not be handled correctly.
So the answer is a qualified "mostly."
Essentially it just inserts pitch-bend instructions as we have to do
manually in Finale. And it does allow us to edit the amount of
pitch-bend we want applied.
What it doesn't say is that successful playback would depend on the
programming of the module being used for playback. I would bet that the
Kontakt player which is their touted wonderful playback mechanism (yes,
there is a Sibelius-GPO version for sale which I bet will be
incorporated into the next release, although that is just conjecture on
my part) is programmed so that full pitch-bend will give a half-step
alteration in pitch. But if the module (or the patch being played) is
programmed for full pitch-bend to give an octave leap, then these midi
messages which the plug-in embeds will end up giving half-octave shifts
instead of quarter-tone shifts.
So that makes the qualified "mostly" even more qualified.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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