----- Original Message ----- From: "dhbailey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 5:56 PM Subject: Re: [Finale] Tan: Henle engraving video
| John Howell wrote: | > At 10:19 PM -0400 9/25/06, Christopher Smith wrote: | >> | >> I know Finale's default spacing is not up to professional standards, | >> for example. But unless they are seeing Finale output tweaked by a | >> pro, they aren't seeing what the program can do, and it is an unjust | >> criticism, in addition to being non-specific. | > | > I hesitate to comment in this particular religious war, because I've | > never seen anyone change their mind, but why in the world should a | > product that claims to be "the best" ship with defaults that have a | > long-time reputation for being "the worst"!?! Yes, the defaults give | > results that look like they've been done by a computer, and a fairly | > retarded computer at that. And then we get stuck playing from those | > awful pages turned out by Nashville arrangers!!! | > | > What percentage of Finale users do you suppose use it right out of the | > box, expect it to give professional results because it's touted as a | > professional tool, and are not power users? 90%? 95%? 99%? In my | > opinion there is no excuse and never has been for shipping defaults that | > are not of professional quality. At the very least, a choice of | > carefully thought out designs should be offered as "house styles." And | > isn't that exactly what the Sibelius designers did? | > | > John | > | > | | You nailed it in one! Finale's marketing department should be ashamed | of themselves for not requiring two default templates, one using Maestro | and the other using Jazz font, which are of the most professional | looking quality, and having all the various templates that the program | ships with match those two in every setting. | | Much of Sibelius' reputation for ease of use comes from the fact that | one can enter music and produce great looking output with very little | inner knowledge of the program or its various adjustable settings and | still get good-looking output. | | Much of Finale's reputation for obtuseness and difficulty of use comes | from the fact that one MUST gain inner knowledge of the program and all | its various adjustable settings to get good-looking output. | | I don't really view this as a religious war, but rather as a statement | of fact. I continue to use Finale because I have learned how to produce | the sort of output that I and my few clients want. I don't use Sibelius | much at all because I have a harder time with the process that it takes | to get a piece of music from manuscript to printed output. That flaw is | mine, not the program's. | | | | -- | David H. Bailey | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | _______________________________________________ | Finale mailing list | [email protected] | http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale | As a user of all three programs Finale, Sibelius, and Lilypond they all have their pluses and negatives. I've never held the belief of being loyal to the product just because it's the one I use. They're tools and you use the one that best works for you. One thing I did notice in the video was that all the layout issues were sorted out before the engraving started. He was engraving page 40 and he knew the bars of music were going to appear on that page. It's funny that the first piece of advice that most notation program manuals give is to type all the music in and then work out the page layout. I wonder what would happen if you locked in the bars first and then filled in the music? I seem to remember something about an engraver used to examine the music and look for the bar with the most amount of notes and use this for the basis of bar lengths (except for extreme bars found in 19th century piano music think Liszt and Chopin with their note runs and decorations). I don't find it useful that both Finale and Sibelius give the advice that their programs use hundreds "special" engraving rules so if you want to make the music fit to a certain number of pages you should either adjust the margins or score size. Maybe, and just maybe this could work for a 'one off' work but for a book of 12 sonatas? I doubt the performer would like play from a book with different sized music and page margins. I've also been using Lilypond for a while and it's not so much the inperpections that make the layout good but the attention to detail. What Lilypond does differently though is that the computer does a lot of some of the manual work for you. As most of you may know that the score is created from a text file.When the score "compiled" this is when the computer is really put to work (something that big names should take note of!!) rather than just place the notes, slurs, lyrics and layout on the page as they were input the whole score is created, recreated until an optimal layout is found according to the limitations the user sets. Staves are spaced to avoid each other, lyrics to avoid notes and slurs are drawn and re-drawn in many configurations and when the best is found this is what appears in the output. This is not to say that Lilypond is perfect it's still a work in progress and least if you want a special feature installed you can sponsor this change or improvement, better than paying your upgrade few and hoping for bug or new feature is included. I've started using Finale and found that while there's lots of bells and whistles to tweak I find it frustrating to know when to stop or even more reset the score back to a default layout if I've gone to far in the wrong direction. But then again a lot of my troubles in using Finale at the moment stem from learning Sibelius first. A lot of the things I learned in Sibelius and done a lot differently in Finale. Trent _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
