At 12:20 AM 06/23/02, Michael Edwards wrote: > [...] I'm well beyond >totally standard, simple music, and I am fussy about what I do being just >what I >want
If you're fussy about exact placement of things then Finale will be a good choice for you -- certainly if the choice is Finale vs Sibelius. Sibelius, along with most lesser programs, is geared toward users who don't want to have to think about the appearance of their music, who would rather just enter the music and have it show up in the "right" place. Finale gives the user a lot of control over the appearance of the music, both by allowing individual elements to be adjusted on a case-by-case basis and by giving access to the rules and settings used by the program for its drawing routines. With Finale, you can adjust almost anything; it's just a matter of how time-consuming it will be. With most other programs, there are a lot of things where you're stuck with the standard whether you like it or not. > Someone mentioned to me a program called Graphire Music Studio. I've also >heard of Graphire Music Press, which I suppose is very similar (if not the >same). How does that compare with Finale? Graphire, as I understand it, is profoundly different from all of the other music engraving programs created in the past 15 years in the way its data is structured. Whereas Finale and almost everything else (except Score) structures its data in forms that make musical sense, Graphire treats it simply as graphic elements on the page. I can see that this has some advantages in flexibility, in that the program isn't tied down by certain forms that are occasionally inconvenient (eg, the measure as a fundamental unit) and makes it easier if you want to do something which is thoroughly non-standard. But it also gives up a lot of power in terms of having the program "understand" how music is supposed to look. Among other things, it will surely never be compatible with playback, and probably not with MusicXML either. I've never tried Graphire, but for serious engraving I would expect the disadvantages to outweigh the advantages. Bernard Hill, who I believe is the inventor of Graphire Music Press, frequents the Internet, though I don't think he's on this list. I'm sure you could locate him, and he'd be happy to discuss it with you. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
