On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 12:19 AM, Craig Parmerlee wrote:
Coda is possibly the only vendor of a major software product that does not provide backwards compatibility.
Er, Sibelius doesn't do this either -- even though this was a promised feature.
Does any music notation software have inter-version compatibility?
That is stupid programming.
No it isn't. It's actually an incredibly difficult challenge to implement, especially for a music notation program, as evidenced by the Distinguished Competition's backsliding on their promise to implement it. It's hard enough getting the newer versions of Finale to open files created by older versions without a hitch. They've finally gotten pretty good at that -- having recently imported some Finale 3.0.1 files using Fin2002, I was prepared for a nightmare but the conversion is astoundingly good, especially given that we're talking about products released almost ten years apart.
Opening a file saved by a newer version using an older version of Finale is a whole 'nother problem. Sure, it would be nice to be able to save in Fin2003, 2002 format or what have you -- but this means (probably) putting virtually all other new features on hold for a year while they figure out a way to make this work. And once implemented, it's a huge investment from year to year, and (potentially) restricts the kinds of new features that can be added. Other applications solve this problem by simply adding more bloat while keeping the file format essentially unchanged (e.g., Microsoft Word). That's not a direction any of us would like Finale to be going in. And as attractive an idea as inter-version compatibility is, achieving it is *not* a trivial problem.
- Darcy
----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Boston MA
No one likes us I don't know why We may not be perfect But heaven knows we try But all around, even our old friends put us down Let's drop the Big One and see what happens
- Randy Newman, "Political Science"
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