John Howell wrote:
At 1:32 PM -0700 6/19/07, Bob Morabito wrote:
Again, Ryan W. (who ALSO wants this feature added, and who has kindly
supplied this info thru my online case)) has told me, that to make
the feature request vote official, people would need to submit it by
opening a case online or call.
I'm wondering if I'm just ignorant of a few things. This is the first
time ever that I've seen the words "opening a case" in regard to
MakeMusic. And I've gotten the distinct impression that MakeMusic does
not operate on the basis of "vote-a-feature." Am I wrong?
And I might also observe that Finale is primarily a notation program,
while MIDI is a set of performance standards. Finale does not pretend
to be a full-featured sequencer, and MIDI was not designed to produce
notation. (Same is true of Sibelius, of course.) Yes, it would be nice
to have one program that satisfies every user's possible wish list, but
is it realistic to expect to find one at an affordable price, and is it
likely that Finale would be that one when known bugs have gone
unaddressed for years?
John
As for the cases, when you make a tech support contact, either asking
for help or asking for some new feature, it is called a case and
receives a number for future reference, should the correspondence go on
and on and other tech support personnel become involved.
And yes, Finale *appears* to be partially a 'vote-a-feature'
application. Makemusic states fairly clearly that the more people who
ask for a feature or a bug-fix the more likely it becomes that it will
actually be acted upon. I think that probability is tempered by several
things: 1) how easy it is to implement or fix; 2) whether the
development team feel like working on it; 3) the marketing department
hasn't claimed so much of the development team's time adding on such
wonderful features such as "micnotator" which are designed to lure new
customers.
As far as midi goes, we all know that Finale isn't a sequencer, but
until the recent development of MusicXML, which is still growing in the
marketplace, there is no lingua franca of the music application world
other than MIDI. So for transfer of data from one application which
does its job very well to another so that the second application can do
its job very well, MIDI remains the only transfer medium. MusicXML is
much more robust and I am very hopeful that more and more applications
will include the ability to import/export MusicXML which will make life
so much easier. But until then, MIDI is what we have to work with to
get a performance recorded in a sequencer into Finale (or Sibelius) for
proper notation.
Finale doesn't do a great job of capturing a live performance.
Sequencers do much better jobs. And sequencers have much better
quantization options so that sloppy playing or rubato tempos can be
brought into much more "straight" alignment to make for better notation
appearance. And Midi is the only way to get that data into Finale, thus
the comlaints about Finale's shortcomings with regards to importing midi
files.
Not that people want to use Finale as a sequencer -- just that for many
people playing in a piano work is far easier and faster than entering
the data note-by-note into Finale. And in other situations, "composers"
these days often are not much more than "midi keyboard noodlers" who
record their masterworks in sequencers and then hire Finale or Sibelius
users to turn that into proper notation. In that situation it's either
import the MIDI data and work with that or spend hours/days doing
off-the-record transcriptions, something that not all of us are
particularly adept at doing.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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