[David H. Bailey:]
>There isn't a downloadable manual for recent versions of Finale.
I was afraid that might be the case. Anyway, thanks for the
suggestions, those who offered some. I will keep them in mind.
>The best I know of would be to purchase the book "Finale 2014
> Trailblazer."
Yes, I'll look for that - hope it's available in Australia. I
might have to order it, since I expect it's specialized enough that I'll
never find it just happening to be in stock in a bookshop.
>Of course downloading that manual for 2009 may provide a lot of
>insight and you may find that not a lot has changed since then. At
>least the basics should be the same.
That's the manual I've been using, and it has been useful for
quite a few things. But I noticed that some utilities have changed from
the menu mentioned in the 2009 manual into another menu, which caused a
bit of confusion until I found out where it was now located.
However, I spent at least half an hour trying to follow the advice
in the manual on how to put pedal markings in piano music, and gave up
without accomplishing this. It explained (and it was an absurdly
complicated procedure for a matter so basic to piano music), and I did
what it said, but when I finally got to creating the expression and
putting it into a score, it just kept trying to put a slur line instead.
And I find its coverage of Speedy Note Entry completely hopeless,
too. It seems to be spread bit by bit in this page and that, but I
managed to glean a bit by putting bits together. But I couldn't find a
"main" section on Speedy Note Entry which explained it clearly. So
progress in understanding that has been excruciatingly slow, and I still
don't feel sure I completely understand it, although I have accomplished
a few things with it, at least.
>MakeMusic assumes that users are always online and they have decided
>in their not-so-infinite wisdom that it's easier for them to keep
>their online content up-to-date.
I guess I can understand that, but it's not much help to people
who for whatever reason are sometimes not on line.
>While Finale is a great program there is much to dislike about
>MakeMusic (and its corporate parent) as a business. Which probably
>explains why it has passed through so many different ownerships in the
>past decade. Each new corporate owner knew they had a couple of great
>products (Finale and SmartMusic) but none of them knew how to expand
>their market share nor how to please their current user base by fixing
>long-standing bugs.
This is odd - it seems to have happened to a few music notation
programs that I know of. Sibelius went through bad times when Avid took
it over and sacked their programmers (who I heard went to Steinberg and
developed Dorico), and users thought it was on the decline; and I recall
the debacle that Igor Engraver became after it initially seemed the best
of all, and that seemed to coincide with ownership changes too. It
doesn't seem entirely coincidental to me.
>In addition it has been many versions since
>anything significant was added to the program.
Is there much more that can be added, and needs to be (for some
users)? While I still know only a little, I can see that it is able to
do just about everything I can think of, and quite a few things I'd
never thought of. I am left wondering how anyone can create such a
complicated program with so many inter-dependent parts, and how it is
able to create a score that looks decent at all.
>But through it all the program itself remains very powerful and very
> capable.
Years ago, I considered various programs, asked a lot of
questions, and in the end couldn't decide and put it in the "too hard to
decide" basket. Life went on and music notation software faded from my
mind rather; but recently I decided to take it up again, getting fed up
with the difficulties of handwritten manuscripts (ranging from the
impossibility of finding really satisfactory manuscript paper to
terrible pain in my right hand if I write many pages, made worse by my
perfectionistic tendencies about neatness of handwritten manuscripts
which I can't seem to deal with despite at times trying to deliberately
write just a bit less neatly). Recently, I re-examined Sibelius and
Finale (more briefly), and finally decided upon Finale, based on the
impression I got that it could do lots and lots of things. (My needs
are probably 95 per cent orthodox, but I do occasionally want to do
unusual things like simultaneous different key or time signatures or
triple-sharps or a few other odd things - but mostly fairly standard
notation. But I am very fussy about wanting things to be just so.)
I only recently learned about Dorico, which I gather is well
thought of; but this was literally later the same day I bought Finale,
so I guess I'll probably let that go unless I later hear seriously good
things about it. I have sort of got the impression (without any real
evidence) that Sibelius is probably not as a good as Finale for some of
the more unusual things I want to do.
Michael Edwards.
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