On 14 Oct 2006 at 2:34, shirling & neueweise wrote: > From: "David W. Fenton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >My experience with Score users is that they have a version of > >Stockholm Syndrome, having adapted to the oddities of Score so much > >that they seem them as advantages. > > this is not so different from finale (or sibelius); > plugins/programmes are developed to deal with the programme's > shortcomings.
Score (like Finale and possibly like Sibelius) has a community of plugin developmers? Score (like Finale) has a public plugin development API? The shortcomings I was referring to were UI and basic structural problems (like being entirely page-based, tied to a single font and having no capability for printing to anything but Postscript printers). > without TGTools and patterson's PIs finale is in my > opinion a not-quite professional programme for publication. finale > and sibelius have improved on the oddities that have existed, but > there are still things that do not work 100%. in score, you can write > 15 or so levels of information for every single note, so the control > you have over individual elements in finale or sibelius is hardly > comparable to score. But the UI is so horrid, almost lacking entirely. Last time I heard, the only MIDI interface was an add-on (for MIDI keyboard input) and didn't work very well. Of course, last I heard anything about Score was 10 or 15 years ago. > >I haven't seen Score output recently. It used to be vastly superior > >to Finale (even done by a gifted Finale engraver). > > i visited someone today who showed me some very decent examples by his > company, created with finale, score and sibelius. i could tell which > was which in most of the cases, but doubt that the average user could > tell the difference. finale is far superior in dealing with complex > part extraction than score or sibelius, but score's spacing is much > more sophisticated. This is certainly where Score has always been good, especially with drawing slurs and ties. Of course, Finale is substantially better at both of those (though still not perfect) than it was back when Score was a viable program. > there are a number of similar examples... > virtually everything i saw today (and most of the work i have done as > well) could be done on any of the three programmes to the same level > of quality - if you have the eye and patience for it. however, because > of the differences in the various programmes, certain tasks take far > more time to do in one or another programme. Specifics on that would be interesting. Score users that I knew got very fast with the input, which was rather similar to what I see in the Finale commandline input, but somewhat more difficult (since rhythm and pitch and other things were input successively, not all in one pass). > also, based on responses i got recently on the score forum, it seems > to me that the community of score users is simply in general far more > interested in quality output than the sibelius or finale community. of > course there are exceptions, but there seems to be a higher percentage > of high-end users of score than of finale or sibelius. This is because it's not possible to be a casual Score user. It's just got no obvious user interface. You've got to know the keyboard shortcuts and how they interact with the mouse clicks or you'll never get anywhere. And you've got to know how to lay out the score before you start. > there are a > greater number of people working for important publishing houses, and > i am sure that very few people -- if any -- from the film music > communities, pop music and church music communities (where quality is > a luxury not an essential) work with score. I don't know anyone who uses Score any more. My department's composers were using it in the early 90s, and then there was a Finale period (before Sibelius became competitive), but I'm out of touch now and don't know if the department is pushing one or the other. Score was never a composer's tool, anyway. > because of the nature of the programme (especially before the update > in 1999) it would have been necessary to actually know something about > engraving traditions, about orchestration, about composition even, > before being able to even begin to work in score. as we all know, > none of these skills are prerequisites to producing output in finale > or sibelius. Do you see these as drawbacks to Finale and Sibelius? I don't. To me, Score represents a program built around a great spacing algorithm, but one that could be simpler because it doesn't have to deal with dynamic data or dynamic layouts (the layout is fixed when you input it, not just at the page level, but at the system level). > and since finale is not developed by musicians... Er, what? > >But I always found it extremely difficult to use, and not very > >helpful for new engraving, as the page layout had to be completely > >fixed before you started engraving. > > this is a question of working methodology. the programme was > developed by knowledgeable engravers from the start, Yes, engravers used to doing what we saw in the Henle video. In other words, a 200-year-old tradition that doesn't reflect the capabilities the computer brings to the process. > i.e. the goal has > always been high-quality publishing level output (judged by existing > plate-publishing standards). the thinking in score reflects this > almost exactly, yes the entire layout has to be planned in advance, as > was the case with plate engraving. And that means the spacing algorithms don't have to calculate certain kinds of things because the engraver does that calculating. > i am currently in the beginning stages of a large project with finale > 2007 (my 1st with F07), and have so far appreciated many of the > important improvements. i am somewhat disappointed to think that > possibly the only reason for us finally having received what i > consider to be a significant upgrade (assuming small bugs will be > ironed out in updates and not added as future "features") is the fact > that sibelius has been kicking finale's ass recently. and i now > wonder what the sale of sibelius to digidesign will mean for finale... > if there is no longer any real competitor to whip them in line every > once in awhile... it could **(again)** mean more bogus updates with > half-ass attempts at fixing long-standing bugs and improvements to > real features that were never incompletely developed in the first > place being marketed as "new and exciting features". Why is it that everyone assumes the purchase of Sibelius by another company means that Sibelius will be weakened? Isn't there a certain synergy involved there? Why would a company purchase Sibelius and then kill it off? > again, i encourage everyone interested in publication-quality > engraving to look into score. Score has no future. It could very easily be completely broken by a shift in the support for old-fashioned graphics (it's a DOS program, after all, and assumes direct hardware access). > i also encourage anyone who has ever > considered abandoning finale (for sibelius, notewriter, or even for > that hack programme lilypond) to let makemusic know the reasons why. > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] with Finale> Back in the early 90s, I regretted choosing Finale instead of Score. Now I don't regret it because Finale has improved in so many of the ways that bothered me, and because Finale remains a viable program. That can't be said for Score, seems to me. > for me, what is keeping me from leaving finale for score is > essentially a question of time: i simply can't afford the time to > learn score to the same level i know finale . also there is a very > different way of thinking for working in score that is simply terribly > foreign to me. it's not better or worse, just so different that i > won't even consider investing the time... at the moment. score > certainly has its idiosyncracies, it has an entirely different way of > thinking, of planning your work, and after seriously looking into it i > have decided -- for the moment -- not to purchase it and abandon > finale. however, as soon as the development of the graphic user > interface for score is completed (along with some hoped-for updates) i > will seriously reconsider score, even if it will mean switching from > mac to PC. Score is never going to be released as a Windows program. Ever. -- 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
