Mark D Lew wrote:
On Jun 19, 2007, at 4:51 PM, keith helgesen wrote:
I am sure there are quite a few people like me out there in Finale-land
still happily using WinFin 2001 or earlier. I seem to recall someone
asking
a question on Fin 97!
Well, I'm not *that* far behind, but I'm in complete agreement with you
on the general point of being satisfied with older versions.
I generally don't upgrade until I have some reason to. I upgraded to
2k2 when I client with a large contract required it. I purchase 2k4
when I thought I would need that for the same client. As it turned out,
the job didn't materialize, so I never bothered installing it. It
wasn't till early this year that I finally did, because I had upgraded
my OS to Tiger and I couldn't get 2k2 to work in Classic anymore.
(Actually, I later discovered that I *could* still run 2k2 in Classic,
but I was going about it wrong, but by the time I had figured that out,
I already had 2k4 up and running.)
I have no complaints with 2k4, but neither to I find it significantly
better than 2k2.
None of the versions since the introduction of staff styles has been
significantly better. They've all added new bells and whistles with
only minor improvements in notation.
Yes, the engraver slurs are nice. Sometimes.
Yes, it's nice that we can now have expressions entered at a uniform
distance below or above the staff. Except when the music forces us to
move them, so that not all are aligned even when they could be.
But in general, the notation aspects of Finale are very mature and there
isn't all that much room for improvement. Certain aspects of the
program, such as midi file import and percussion map definitions and
usage remain untouched black-holes into which we all work hard not to
fall, but in general the notation has been very stable for a long time.
But that huge leap with staff styles was such a quantum leap that I
can't believe anybody would still be using a version which didn't have
staff styles.
Linked score/parts promises to be another such major improvement, but
the reality is far short of the potential and we all have to do such
major workarounds to get the score to look as we want and also get the
parts to look like we want that for many of us, the older part
extraction into separate documents is still the preferrred method.
I am hoping that Finale2008 brings "linked score/parts v2.0" with the
major hassles fixed, making it what it should have been in version 1.0.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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