On Jun 5, 2004, at 8:18 PM, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
[responding to David Fenton's suggestion]
which I must say, does not match my experience at all. After several years of creating choral music in various layout patterns, I find that for initial entry of simple lyrics, and for editing which changes the total number of syllables assigned to notes contained in a particular staff, type into score is works quite well.DON'T USE TYPE INTO SCORE
Once you figure that out, it's pretty easy to use.
I still say that either system is mostly fine on it's own, and mixing the two is was leads to trouble. That's why users of either thinks the problem is with the other.
In your case, Noel, you say that you are fine working with both, but in your other post you talk about kludgy techniques like typing in a dummy character in the score and then deleting that same character from Edit Lyrics. In other words, you have an idea of how the system works and can manipulate accordingly. Fine, so can I, but that isn't what I'd expect from a system that "works quite well". Someone less experienced or knowledgeable can get in quite a mess if he enters and edits lyrics in an unusual or haphazard order.
The real problem with the lyrics system, in my view, (and this is probably true of other systems, as well) is the fact that there is no place where the details of how the system actually works are provided, and there should be.
I too would love to have specific technical information of exactly how Finale arranges syllables entered or edited with Type in Score. It's still something of a mystery to me. It's obviously making some effort to re-order your syllables for you, but at the same time it doesn't quite do a complete job of it -- probably with good reason, because they don't dare overthink your work for you and end up canceling out something you did on purpose.
What I think would improve the system, without totally overhauling it, is to add a function called something like "reorganize lyric data". This would be an algorithm that goes through the whole piece, looking at where you've got syllables assigned and making sense of it, and then it would clean out all the lyric data and rewrite it fresh in a logical order and reassign syllables so that it still reads the same as you had it, but the underlying data is better organized now.
The point of this would be as an emergency cleanup for when someone gets in trouble. If you've got one of those situations where you try to fix one thing but it just screws up somewhere else, or a lost syllable leading to extra hyphens strung across the page, the "reorganize lyric data" would clean that up, so that you could then proceed to make your edits without it going wacko on you.
Naturally, users will have different preferences about various things, so there will be a panel of options for Reorganize Lyric Data, just as there is for Music Spacing. This would be things like whether to delete unassigned syllables, whether to write duplicates for syllables multiply assigned, whether to sort your verses from top to bottom, etc. You could turn things off or on according to your preference.
Now then, also analogous with Music Spacing, there should be a switch for "Automatic Lyric Reorganizing". If you have that turned on then it will do this on the fly as you enter your data. In other words, what Type in Score already half does, but more thoroughly and more logically, since it'll be looking at the whole document. (And like its fellow "Automatic" options, it'll probably slow down the program....)
The information should also be there that this order can be over-ridden by using "click into score", as it is possible to write the syllables of any text in reverse order (back to front) and have the syllable appear in proper order in the score (front to back). It is also possible using "click into score" to have syllables in the lyric box which do not ordinarily appear in the score, to assign multiple syllables to the same word, and assign multiple words to the same syllable.
All of which are things that are asking for trouble, if you ask me. Sure you can click-assign your syllables in reverse order of how they are in the lyric data. But why? For starters, it mucks up all your hyphens. If your lyric data says, "you! to day birth- py Hap-" and you click-assign them into the score backward, hoping to get "Hap-py birth-day to you!", you'll actually get two strings of hyphens running off to the end of the system. (And heaven forbid you try a Shift Syllables on that!)
Similarly, if you're assigning multiple syllabes to the same note -- I assume you mean "note" instead of "word" in that last sentence, right? -- why wouldn't you want them to be in separate verses? One voice isn't going to sing two syllables simultaneously, so the two syllables must be separate at some level, different voices, 1st vs 2nd repeat, original language vs translation, whatever. In any of those cases, it makes good sense to put the two different verses in order to take advantage of all the flexibility that gives (shifting, adjusting baselines, changing font all at once, etc).
I'm not saying that you should never ever be able to do any of these things. I like Finale's mega-flexibility as much as the next guy, even for weirdo things that you wouldn't "normally" want to do. I'm just saying that once you start messing with stuff like that you're going against the logic of the system, so it's no wonder that your shift lyrics or your hyphens go haywire when you do. You shouldn't be messing with that stuff unless you know what you're doing. And Finale should make it so that it isn't so easy for someone who doesn't know better to do it accidentally.
mdl
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