At 7:26 AM +0100 2/2/11, Jari Williamsson wrote:
On 2011-02-02 00:07, David W. Fenton wrote:
Finale's defaults have always been terrible, and no one who wants
decent output uses the defaults for layout. The experienced Finale
user can get excellent output, but at the cost of a pretty large
investment in learning what to change from the way Finale sets things
up by default.
IMO, what you're talking about is based on very old Finale versions.
Sure, someone might need thicker lines for his/her particular
printer and someone might need tighter vertical positioning in some
of the expression categories, but generally the defaults in the
different Document Styles are pretty good nowadays.
I'm sure that is true, Jari. But you cannot downplay the influence
of reputation. Tons of absolutely dreadful pages of music were made
public during the '90s out of centers like Nashville, where a great
many arrangers were using Finale right out of the box with its awful
defaults. (And of course they should have been able to use ANY
program right out of the box and expect well-designed defaults!) I
joined this list in the late '90s when our Music Department was about
to adopt Finale, and made this argument then, but was shouted down by
those who maintained that there were so many variables that no
universally-acceptable set of defaults would satisfy everyone. Which
struck me then and still does as a kind of reductio ad absurdam
argument!
In the early '90s, Composer's Mosaic was already capable of turning
out close-to-professional output with its defaults, although it was a
comparatively limited program. But what it did it did very well, and
the defaults were professionally acceptable. And at the same time
Finale was much more flexible, but had already established a
reputation that scared many people away, including me! Mosaic also
had linked parts right from the beginning, 10 or 15 years before they
appeared in either Finale or Sibelius, and they worked just fine.
And Sibelius' defaults and output have been professionally acceptable
from my first experience with it. Sure is funny how two completely
different companies can come up with good defaults, while a third
just doesn't bother to try.
In the event, when our Department adopted Finale (around '98) I never
learned it, again scared away by both the bad reputation for having a
horrid learning curve and by the bad-looking examples I was still
seeing. I would guess that about 10% of our students actually
learned to use it with skill, while the other 90% hated it! But we
only switched to Sibelius when Mac started shipping OSX, and there
was no version of Finale ready for it, and that marketing disaster
was entirely the fault of MakeMusic or Coda or whoever it was at that
time. And I would estimate that 100% of our students are able to USE
Sibelius, and probably around 70% are quite comfortable with it.
So reputation, good or bad, IS important, and it CAN scare people
away, and so can going for years without bothering to fix bugs that
are still generating negative comments on this very list. But it
remains true that whatever works best for YOU is what you should
choose and use.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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