Hah!  Jef, no you haven’t, but I do appreciate that there may be some deserved 
sarcasm in your message.

I have been a Finale user since v 1.0 (it cost something like $1000 when it was 
first released, if I remember correctly, and that probably translates into 
quite a bit more in today’s dollars).  I have gotten to know a few of the Coda 
Music people, then MM people over the years - sometimes at conventions where 
they were demonstrating Finale, sometimes through correspondence, and always 
found them to be friendly and committed to making something that is such a help 
to me in my work that I have been forgiving of what are sometimes obvious 
shortcomings.  And I have been optimistic in assuming that the goals of the 
company have not been so different from mine that my input would fail to be 
heard and taken into account.

I have accepted the financially driven orientation towards what I consider to 
be lowest common denominator educational use, even understanding that this 
might be pulling attention and resources away from elements that are essential 
to me.  (Like most on this list, I have no use for many of the superficial 
school-y stuff.)

Another thing that keeps me faithful, and perhaps blindly optimistic, is that I 
just do not want to learn a new piece of complex software.  I have acquired a 
little sense of how Finale works “under the hood” - enough so that I can 
usually beat it into submission when I have something to do that Finale is 
reluctant to do in a straightforward fashion.  Sibelius doesn’t seem to be 
better to me - (I could be wrong - don’t really know), and I don’t want to 
spend weeks learning new working methods in order to find out.  Spreadbury’s 
promised new software will not include chord symbols, and it will present the 
sam obstacle of learning new methods of controlling it.  At this point, not an 
attractive alternative to me.

Now - after considerable fanfare and what seems to me to have been a long wait, 
I am underwhelmed by some things in this release.  And the printing screw up 
seems inexcusable.  Of course, there are workarounds, the easiest of which may 
be to print from 2014.5.  But to release a long awaited new version with a 
blatant flaw in an essential element of the workflow is certainly, at the very 
least, sloppy.  Where were the beta testers?

Of course, there are some obvious improvements in the new version.  For those 
of us, like me, who do not hear written music flawlessly in our imagination, 
improved playback is helpful.  And I imagine that speed improvements may prove 
to be good.  However - some other things for which there has been a substantial 
volume of support have been ignored for several years.  MM admits that there 
have been many requests for the restoration of the old, colorful, configurable 
tool pallets - perhaps overly large for laptop users and relegated to the 
category of eye candy to others, but a useful visual aid for anyone with less 
than 20/20 vision.  

Like many others, I have requests that seem reasonable to me that continue to 
go unanswered.  Mark Adler (always courteous and responsive) told me that, 
though he understood and agreed with me about how Finale is misdirected in how 
it handles the default spacing of tuplets with brackets, and that he also 
understood how it could be fixed, that there was not time to include it in this 
long waited and expensive release.  That is a disappointment.  (If your bracket 
hooks are larger than 12 evpus - a half space, then outside of staff vertical 
placement is inconsistent.  I prefer .75 space hooks, but I must now choose 
between hooks that look small to me or constant fussing with the vertical 
placement of some tuplets where Finale places the bracket correctly but 
misaligns the number relative to the bracket, if the hooks are more than a half 
space long.)

So, perhaps not so optimistic at the moment.  I will send this to Mark too, and 
while not naive, I do hope it has some salutary effect.

Chuck


> On Aug 22, 2016, at 12:14 AM, SN jef chippewa <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> 
> chuck, have i ever told you how much i admire your optimism?
> 
>> ... this is a glaring bug and should get a quick repair. I will let 
>> them know how damaging this is.
> 
> -- 
> 
> neueweise -- fonts for new music (and traditional) notation
> [JAN 2016] v. 1.002 for Finale 2014.5 and PC
> http://newmusicnotation.com/fonts.html
> 
> shirling & neueweise | http://newmusicnotation.com
> new music notation  +  arts management  +  translation
> [FB] http://facebook.com/neueweise  |  [TW] http://twitter.com/neueweise
> 
> _______________________________________________
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Chuck Israels
[email protected]
(360) 201-3434

8831 SE 12th Ave.
Portland OR 97202

<chuckisraelsjazz.com>




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