Please excuse the cross posting and apologies to those who will receive this update to my previous StaffPad review multiple times.
I know that for users of Sibelius and Finale, regular updates of the software are very important and in recent years have been less than overwhelming as corporate politics and financial problems have gotten in the way of offering real improvements to the software. I am posting this because I want everybody to know that is *not* the case for the developers of StaffPad, who are working hard to improve their product. They have been very responsive to suggestions and questions from users around the world, and I have been very impressed with the speed of their replies to my inquiries and their concerns about complaints and suggestions I made concerning the initial release of StaffPad. StaffPad has been on the market for just over 4 weeks and already David and Matt, the two designers and principal programmers of StaffPad, have just released a very major update to the software. I will mention some of the major details later on in this message but for those who want more detailed information here are two important links: <http://blog.staffpad.net/> <http://www.staffpad.net/data/StaffPad_Changelog_1_1_1_2.pdf> Here is a video of David Hearn using StaffPad on a SurfacePro3 at the keynote presentation for Microsoft Build 2015: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkvk6V9lMyE&feature=youtu.be> Some of the major improvements in this update: 1) the ability to reorder the staves in the score -- in the initial release the instruments were placed in the score in traditional orchestral order, so that, for example, the horn would be placed as the top staff even in a brass quintet, where it is traditionally the middle staff, right after the trumpets. Now there are the same Move Up and Move Down possibilities in staff placement as there are in Sibelius and Finale. The score can be set up initially in the preferred order, or if a change is desired once a score has been started, that can be done as well. 2) custom time signatures -- initially users had to choose from a relatively small number of predefined time signatures but now if the user scrolls to the right end of the list of predefined time signatures there is an icon to tap which has dots only on it and that allows the user to enter any number for the denominator and then choose the desired note value. They haven't gone so far as to allow non-traditional numbers on the bottom of the time signatures such as 3 or 6 -- there have been numerous discussions on various notation lists as to whether or not most musicians would know how to interpret those. The top number can't be a fraction so meters such as 2.5/4 would have to be written in the more traditional 5/8. But at least the possibilities have been increased far beyond the initial release. 3) printing of parts has improved in several ways -- multi-rests are now possible and are user selectable (either on or off for the entire part) and the printing of parts which use the same instrument has been improved as well. In the initial release all staves which used the same instrument were printed together on a part -- with this update the user can select whether to print each such staff separately or together. For example in a brass quintet if the two trumpet staves had the instrument "trumpets" they would have both printed on the same pages when the parts were printed. Now they can be selected individually and will print separately. 4) playback of indicated tempos is much more accurate. There are many more small updates and behind-the-scenes fixes and improvements, all of which are outlined in the changelog for which I posted a link earlier in this message. This update is a huge leap forward for StaffPad, moving it a long way forward on its journey to being a major player in the computer-notation world. It has become an important tool in my composition toolbox! It is still basically a Microsoft Surface product, but there have been reports of people using it with other computers as long as they have a touch sensitive input device of some sort, including running under Parallels on a Mac. I have no idea how successful or enjoyable using StaffPad on such devices is, but I can say that using StaffPad on my Microsoft SurfacePro3 is a very enjoyable experience! -- David H. Bailey [email protected] http://www.davidbaileymusicstudio.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: [email protected]
