At 06:55 PM 2/27/04 +0200, Mr. Liudas Motekaitis wrote: >(1) Although I'm not sure, but as an educated guess, I'd say that most of >Finale's bugs, kludges, and bad programming that infuriate Dennis have to >do with the fact that the programmers who work on music notation software >have to be musically inclined. They must equally know about the theory of >music, notation issues, and they must be able to program. That combination >is rare in this world.
Maybe, maybe not. The author of Graphire was not a musician, other than to play the occasional acoustic guitar. He developed the program to go with the Synclavier, and took it independent when the Synclavier died. He developed it in consultation with musicians in every area of music, including the production film studios who were looking for an alternative to Finale, which was very slow to be able to use for instant next-day studio sessions. There's a long history (I have quite a bit on videotape), but what you say is not borne out by the reality of that program. >(2) I don't see the point in Dennis using Finale. I do it because I work for >publishers who need PDF's to print professionally. Couldn't Dennis save a >lot of time and nerves by writing by hand? All of the things he wants are >just a single pencil-stroke away (to use the famous "one-click-away" concept >in the opposite sense). Maybe. But I'm presently setting Larry Polansky's Four Voice Canons from the inked version, which already exists. I do work for several composers, but they're all, alas, alive and requiring the program actually do contemporary notation... not that Four Voice Canon #5 is exactly contemporary, as it was written in 1985. Interestingly, David Fuqua (who has moved to Tibet) used to engrave Polansky's music ... using Graphire. So I'm up against some pretty good-looking stuff. Speaking of the Polansky, I need an 'approximate equals' sign in one of the music fonts (the curved equal sign) to add before dynamic markings. Anybody seen one? >(3) About clicking. I've said this before. Clicking is not faster than >typing. Typing is the fastest input mechanism ever invented. You have ten >fingers and you can have LOTS of keys and key combinations. I wasn't making a comparison. Did I imply that somewhere? I didn't mean to ... and Graphire includes a complete set of keystrokes, macros, etc. I'm guess I'm in annoyance mode because this Polansky score should have been done days ago, but a lot of basic features are just plain missing from Finale. Here's another I can't find: Extending tuplets to full length of time. Polansky has indicated all tuplet brackets to encompass the left notehead through the end of performance time, i.e., right up to the beginning of the next tuplet. The entire piece is tupleted in voices 2 and 3, and that's a bucket of tuplets. I've been doing these all by hand, dragging the left and right nodes and dragging the number to the center. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
