On 5 Oct 2006 at 22:10, John T Sylvanis wrote: > I think integration will happen because the market will > mature one day and then someone will HAVE to make a move to entice > people to buy the product of their new, epochal, idea which has been > done by Microsoft 20 years before
You keep citing Microsoft as an example of "integration." But that is simply not correct in anything except a superficial level. Word does not include Excel's capabilities. All it allows is the embedding of an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document. The analogy to a notation package and a sequencer is unclear. Finale does not store its data as MIDI, so you couldn't just embed an existing sequencer into Finale. No sequencer I know of reads Finale data files, so that's not going to work, either. What you're asking for is not integration on the MS model, but the incorporation of a whole set of features into Finale that don't fit very well with what Finale is. I think limited sequencing capability in the service of producing good playback is a good thing in Finale. A full-fledged sequencer, however, makes no sense to me, as that's not the purpose of Finale. Now, if Finale teamed with the maker of a sequencer such that the sequencer's output could be imported into Finale without the current problems of MIDI import, such that it would be painless to open the sequencer file and convert it to printed notation, that would be quite wonderful. But I don't think it would be a MIDI file that would be used, as that's inherently too ambiguous to give good results. Indeed, I don't see how a sequencer could ever produce data that's unambiguous for a notation package without there being some kind of notational representation within the sequencer -- after all, MIDI doesn't specify flat or sharp. For my purposes, a few well-chosen revisions and additions to the current Finale MIDI tools (including a modern UI) would be all that's necessary to give me what's needed to create the playback I need. I wonder if there is a large enough audience of Finale users who'd benefit from such innovations to make it worth the effort of the programmers. And I also don't think the number of people who work first from a sequencer is going to place that high a value on Finale's notational capabilities to justify the programming investment to attract their interest. In an ideal world, sure, I'd love a fully integrated sequencer in Finale, or, even, hooks between an existing sequencer and Finale so that Finale used the sequencer for editing MIDI data and the sequencer used Finale for notational output. But in the real world, I don't don't think MakeMusic has the capital to do that. Whether or not Sibelius does is an open question. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
