"David W. Fenton" wrote:
> Am I right in guessing that, when using TYPE IN SCORE, the EDIT
> LYRICS window is populated in the order in which you enter the
> lyrics, rather than in any logical order related to the score layout?
> That is, if the first thing you enter typing into the score is the
> bass line's lyrics, that will be the first thing in the EDIT LYRICS
> window?
This is consistent with my experience, and as a matter of expedience, one of the
first things I do when starting a new project, is to open the text window, and type
in a label for each staff which should have lyrics, and the first and last words of
each line. I then click assign the first syllable to the first note of each line
when I am ready to begin entering lyrics. Thereafter, most of my lyrics work is done
in "type into score" mode, as I use the entering lyrics process as a version of
proofreading the musical score.
However, I should say that this seems only to effect the "staff" order of the lyric
assignments. Once the initial syllable is entered for any given line of music, all
other syllables in that line are inserted into the block in the appropriate string.
> What I understand now is that the lyrics subsystem is designed around
> a number of assumptions about the way lyrics ought to work:
My experience with the lyric systems does not support your supposition as to the
assumptions around which the lyric system was based. In my experience the number of
choral compositions in which the lyrics in all voices are identical is quite small.
In any choral literature, there is almost always at least some independence in at
least one vocal line, and I would submit that the assumption was that in most cases,
the complete lyric would be entered for each line, but in order to minimize file size
(and remember, FIN's most fundamental assumptions go back to days when a 50 MB hard
disk was considered very big, and was priced accordingly), and minimize working time,
the capabilities of mirroring lyrics was introduced.
> Thus, you should enter the lyrics once, and then click assign from
> the single statement of the lyrics to particular notes.
Seems to me that this statement might be an accurate assessment of the initial
programming parameters, but I suspect that the assumption would have inserted the
words "for each staff" between the words "lyrics" and "once" above. And I never
heard anything back from Coda, either. I conclude that
> writing to WinSupport is a waste of time.
I've gotten back a response from WinSupport to every question I ever asked, though
sometimes it has taken three or four days.
> In short, this subsection of Finale is a horrid mess. It is built
> around a number of rigid assumptions about the way lyrics work in
> real musical situations and because of the rigidity with which those
> assumptions have driven the design of the user interface, the bolted-
> on TYPE INTO SCORE feature (by far the most intuitive way to enter
> lyrics, seems to me), which is very poorly connected to the
> underlying data storage, very easily leads users into creating a mess
> that will become corrupted very easily.
I disagree; I find the "Type into Score" method to be better connected to the
underlying data storage than is the "edit window" method.
> One of the reasons my lyrics were such a mess is because I entered
> them from an existing score, two pages at a time. That is, from one
> opening of my source score, for example, I typed in the bass lyrics,
> then the alto, then the soprano and then the tenor. That is a
> PERFECTLY LOGICAL entry method. But because the user interface is not
> sufficiently abstracted from the data storage, this creates a huge
> mess in the EDIT LYRICS window (the canonical text). In fact, it
> seems to me that the canonical text is what displays in the score,
> not what displays out of context in the EDIT LYRICS window.
Frankly, I have done the same thing, and do not find my experience to coincide with
yours. It has been my experience that the only time that the sequence of typing
lyrics into the score has a significant impact on order in the lyrics block is that
the order of the subsets of the lyric block assigned to a particular staff is
determined by the order in which the first lyric of each staff was entered, so that
if the first syllable of the bass line was entered first, the string of syllables of
the bass line will be first in the lyric block. The second string in the lyric block
will be the string for the staff which was the second to have the first syllable
entered into the score.
> So, I understand how and why, but I still think the whole thing is a
> huge mess, fraught with potential errors for the user that should be
> prevented by a properly designed and implemented user interface.
I'm still not convinced it is not properly designed and implemented; I'd agree that
it is badly documented, however.
In Coda's defense, it seems appropriate here to note that the programmers who
originally programmed Finale v. 1, and who made initial assumptions upon which the
lyrics (or for that matter, any other particular implementation is based) probably no
longer work at Coda. It is entirely possible, IMO, that the present people at CODA
have no better knowledge of the initial assumptions that we do, and that they are
maintaining and building on an infrastructure that they had as little input on as we
do.
ns
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