At 05:28 AM 7/18/2007 -0400, dhbailey wrote: >Heck, if someone had asked me if it were possible entirely in Finale, >I'd have said "No." and you've just shown me that a determined and quite >excellent Finale user could do what I would have thought impossible
But I was doing these things -- albeit not so easily or as prettily -- in Finale 2.2, during my first week of using the program almost fifteen years ago. Among the first scores I put into Finale 2.2 were: "Withered" (1971) <http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/music/pdf/withered.pdf> "Specimen" (1973) <http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/music/pdf/specimen.pdf> "Thièle" (1992) <http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/music/pdf/thiele.pdf> These PDFs were redone -- but by importing the 2.2 scores into later versions of Finale, not re-doing them. Some later Finale additions (especially staff styles) made many of these things easier, but the heart of doing flexible work was already in Finale that far back. Maybe this kind of scoring can be done in Sibelius (the quarter-tone piece can), but when I see PDFs of new music online, they turn out to have been done in Score (here's one: <http://www.scoremus.com/psexm2.html> ), many in Finale, some in Graphire (here's one: <http://www.graphire.com/Pages/MP/Examples/MPslip.htm> ) and Lilypond (here's one: <http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.10/input/proportional> ), and the remainder largely in graphical programs (where I believe many of the Stockhausen scores where done). Should there be Sibelius examples, I'd certainly like to see them. But I haven't yet, and until they appear, I'll caution anyone who says they are a composer and publisher about to switch to Sibelius. As you say, this advanced notation is of interest to a small proportion of Finale users. How does proportion translate into actual numbers, though? Maybe I just travel in niche compositional circles, but I don't think so. If Finale improves its handling of notation, it will become the program of choice for new composition (and cost my clients less -- those staggered barlines are still a bear). As it stands, Finale can't compete with Sibelius for the educational or traditional scoring market. It's just losing that en masse. Finale's strength has never been ease-of-use, but depth of features, and it continues to be a mystery to me why they refuse to clean up all the bugs and reinforce the deeper features that have always distinguished the program as truly professional. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
