On 17 Sep 2002 at 20:09, Mark D. Lew wrote: > In various posts, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >This is completely unacceptable behavior -- it is basically > >completely unusable in any fashion, by any of the various methods. > > > >What the hell am I going to do here? > > I'm coming into this discussion a day late, so probably you've solved > everything by now. > > If I had read your original post when it first came out, my immediate > advice would have been to clear out ALL the lyrics in the entire file and > re-enter them all from scratch in a logical fashion. I know that sounds > draconian, but it's important to keep your syllables in good order. Once > you've accidentally mucked them up, going back and trying to make repairs > usually leads to further problems; chances are, you'll spend far more time > (and frustration) chasing after every little bug, and when you're done you > still won't be sure that everything is fixed. Re-entering all the lyrics > from scratch seems like a lot of wasted time, but it's really not such a > big deal.
However correct you may be as the voice of experience, that is the most ludicrous advice I've ever heard. Being forced to completely re- enter data that's already in the file in order to get rid of some artifacts of an erroneous edit shows that the database is corrupted and that the database engine that Finale relies on is simply not reliable. That's a really serious indictment of the stability of the Finale file format. > Indeed, if for some reason your file is still giving you lyric problems, > that is STILL my advice: Clear out all the lyrics from the entire file and > delete them from the Edit Lyrics windows, then start over in an organized > fashion. I will mail the file to Coda to ask them to fix it before I will even contemplate re-doing literally hours and hours of lyrics placement. In fact, I'll used damned white out on the printed score before I would ever re-enter all of this. > -- > >It's as though I've got two sets of lyrics on one baseline, and one > >is a big long word extension. > > That's exactly what you've got. Why are there no editing facilities that expose this for correction? > >When I choose EDIT LYRICS, this text is not even there! > > It's in there somewhere, probably a duplicate of a syllable you're using > elsewhere. If you really want to find it, use the type in score function to > change it to something ridiculously large and watch to see what else > changes along with it. I don't understand. Change *what* to something large? > When syllable assignments aren't consecutive, Finale gets confused. This > is why it's a bad idea to copy and alter syllables haphazardly. >From my point of view I was not doing anything haphazard. It's only in the crazy upside-down world of Finale lyrics copying that I was being haphazard. > -- > >That's a bloody stupid default setting, seems to me. > > > >It means that I don't get the benefit of knowing where the lyrics are > >that I'm going to change. > > True. That's why you shouldn't change these lyrics at all. You should clear > the copied assignments and enter new ones. How in the hell is somebody supposed to know that? There are no warnings in 1" type in the online manual, and I didn't read that until after I had a problem, in any case, because I thought I was doing something simple, copying pre-existing data to a later part of the file. This is something I've been doing for 12 years of using Finale (never before with lyrics, obviously), so I didn't *know* I needed to do something special. > Your initial problem resulted from this. Your subsequent problems with > hyphens, mixed up syllables, and so forth resulted from trying to go behind > the scenes and patch together repairs. I did nothing but type-in-score corrections -- nothing behind-the- scenes at all. In fact, I used only the editing facilities exposed by the programmers, so the results should be reliable and consistent. That they are not shows that the program is fundamentally broken. > >It also means that I now have to jump through hoops to not lose the > >changes I've already made to the musical text (the rhythm is not the > >same). > > Yes, that's unfortunate. When you make an error which corrupts a file > irreparably and then you proceed with further work not realizing that the > file has been spoiled, you're going to lose all the extra work when the > error is finally discovered. A reliable program does not "corrupt a file irreparably" when its proper editing facilities are used to change the file. > In your case (and in most cases like this), the best course would have been > to clear out all the lyrics and re-enter them. That way your changes to the > music would be preserved. The changes to the musical text were trivial to recreate in comparison to the Draconian advice that I have to completely redo the lyrics from scratch. > >Could someone explain to me *why* this default is a good idea? And > >why it can't be turned off? > > The fact that mass copy creates aliases to the lyrics as opposed to new > ones is not illogical at all. . . . As an option, it's not illogical. As the default, and the only option other than re-typing, it is fundamentally nonsensical. > . . . It is exactly analogous to how articulations > and expressions work. If you were to copy several measures of music > complete with all the expressions, and then went in to change individual > instances of "mf" or "cresc" to "mp" or "dimin.", you would make a hash of > your expression list and foul up other instances of those same expressions > in the same document. But lyrics and articulation definitions are fundamentally different. Lyrics are like the musical text. If Finale created a mirror by default and offered no other copying method, *that* would be analogous to the way lyrics work. > The difference is that with lyrics, with its type-in-score function and no > separate window for the changes, this process is less obvious to the user. The default process is completely counterintuitive. The lack of an optional setting to do it the other way is fundamentally *wrong* program design. > Hence, a user unfamiliar with how the lyric system works is more likely to > screw things up without realizing it. (This, incidentally, should set off > alarm bells for the plan -- advocated by many in this group -- of devising > a type-in-score scheme for expressions. Under the type-in-score expression > ideas we've sketched out here, I could very easily imagine some unwary user > doing a similar mass copy, followed by type-in-score alterations to the > markings, leading to chaos of the exact same sort that you encountered with > lyrics.) Oh, bollocks. This is an instance where Finale is fundamentally broken. The default behavior of the copy is one issue alone, an ill- chosen default with no sensible alternative. But the real issue is that the process is not *reversible*, that once the mistake has been made, you can't undo it. That shows a fundamental disconnect between the user interface and the underlying data store. > I think we all agree that the lyric system is somewhat clumsy and > confusing. . . . It is poorly designed and BROKEN. > . . . I do agree that Coda would do well to make it more "idiot- > proof" so that newbies can't so easily get themselves into trouble[*]. It's not a matter of idiot proofing at all -- it's a matter of fixing the program so that the user interface allows the user to change the underlying data according to the end user's needs. > . . . But I would > not join with those who think that copy should default to creating a whole > new set of syllables. . . . The default would be OK *if* you could turn it off, though in my opinion, counterintuitive. > . . . Unless you're revamping the whole lyric scheme > altogether, that would be illogical and inconsistent with how the system > works. Would you have it do the same thing for expressions? Expressions copy in exactly the way that's expected. As I said above, you are wrong that lyrics are analogous to expressions/articulations -- they are actually somewhere in between expressions/articulations and the musical text, in that they may get re-used a couple of times. The reason I don't use mirrors, despite the musical sense of them, is that they are too literal and just don't work well enough to make them worthwhile. Clearly, the lyrics are also in that class. > Once you have a feel for how the program keeps track of lyric syllables, > it's pretty easy to get the results you want. . . . There is still something broken at a very basic level because the UI does not allow you to actually fix the problems in the underlying data. > . . . Like many things in Finale, > it takes a few jobs to get the hang of it. . . . This is very different from any issue I've ever encountered, in that my data is corrupt and I can't correct the corruption short of deleting all lyrics data and starting over. > . . . If you're copying music to make > a second verse with different lyrics, the sensible course is to do the mass > copy, then clear all the lyrics in the new version, then enter the new > lyrics from scratch. If it's a different set of lyrics, it's logical and > easier to enter them separately rather than revising the wrong text > syllable by syllable. Making alterations to the first set of lyrics is > asking for serious problems, because -- as you now realize -- what you're > really doing is futzing around with the entries you've already made > elsewhere. Really, instructions on how to do this without encountering the fundamental bugs are completely beside the point. > Incidentally, we've had threads in the past where users have discussed > their preferred methods for entering lyrics. I was surprised at the wide > variety of techniques, but the one thing we all had in common is agreement > on the importance of proceeding in a logical, systematic fashion. Entering > and changes syllables haphazardly is what leads to confusion. It's sort of > the same idea as writing ad hoc spaghetti code with no documentation. What the hell does "haphazard" mean? If the UI allows it, there's nothing haphazard about it. From my point of view I did nothing "haphazard" at all. I entered the lyrics syllable by syllable, page by page of my source score. I then copied and started editing the copied lyrics. This was not "haphazard" in any human-meaningful sense -- it was fundamentally logical and systematic. That Finale screwed up the data shows that the haphazardness is inside Finale itself. > [*] One thing that would make all these problems go away is if it were > changed so that it's impossible to assign the same syllable more than once. But then that would take away the capability of re-using a single text block in more than one place. That capability is a *good* thing. That it is the *default* for copying is where things start to go wrong. That a mistaken copy operation is not reversiable is the most serious problem. > In other words, every syllable in the list is used once and only once. > Personally, I wouldn't mind this one bit, since that's how I operate > anyway. (On occasions when I really do need the same lyrics more than once, > I make a fresh copy in a new verse box, just in case I ever want to change > them in one place but not the other.) I would, however, miss it if the > whole system of indirection were scrapped. I do very much appreciate the > ability to enter and edit the syllables directly in the Edit Lyrics window > and then make the assignments to the score separately. There is no computer programming problem that stands in the way of making the current user interface reliably manipulate the underlying data in the file. That it does not is a massive BUG. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
