I'd like to put my 2 cents in on this playback issue.
I've been using MOTU's Performer (now Digital Performer) for sequencing and recording since 1990. I bought MOTU's Mosaic at the NAMM show the weekend that it was released. I hoped that I could use Performer as a writing tool, which would also give me a decent demo of my work, and then open the SMF in Mosaic, and quickly print my music to be played by live players.
I quickly discovered that the SMF looked terrible in Mosaic, even after quantizing everything perfectly. It required so much fixing that it was actually faster to start over in Mosaic, entering the entire arrangement from scratch. This was a big disappointment for me, because it meant doing all of my work twice.
After MOTU failed to support Mosaic through upgrades, I moved to Finale. This was in 2000. I continued to work the same as before, sequencing my music in Digital Performer, then starting over from scratch in Finale in order to print my music out. Only now I had to learn a completely new (to me) notation program, with a pretty high learning curve. And I was still doing my work twice.
MOTU began to add some notation features to DP's Quickscribe editor, I assume in order to appease those of us who wanted better notation--alto and tenor clefs, transposed parts, dynamics, repeats, etc. But the last couple of upgrades of DP had no new notation features, and I think that MOTU just decided that they'd leave notation to Finale and Sibelius. And let's face it--DP's Quickscribe will never give us all the notation features that a dedicated notation program like Finale offers. So I was still stuck doing all of my work twice.
Now Finale begins to add playback features that seem to have quite a few people excited. Human Playback, plus the ability to use a sample player, such as GPO, may mean that someone like me can just do all of his/her work in Finale, and create a decent demo without having to go into another program to do it. As long as it's a demo you're going for, I mean, how good does it really have to be? If you make it TOO good, the client might just use IT, instead of hiring all those players. And at least I wouldn't have to do my work twice!
BTW, I've tried saving a Finale file, with Human Playback applied, as an SMF and opening it in DP, where I have access to MOTU's Mach-5 sample player. It only takes a few minutes to record the music and save it as a burnable audio file. And it sounds pretty organic. I tried selecting Romantic as my Human Playback style, and the tempo fluctuated all the way through the piece, which showed up in DP, making playback even more organic. But if I can access a sample player in Finale, why even go to DP at all? Now, we're still talking demos here.
As to Hiro's story about losing his gig because the company got sued by the union for replacing players with sequenced parts--all I can say is that they deserved to get sued, and I hope the union won. I'm sorry you lost work, Hiro, but however great your sequences were, they couldn't have been as good as having real players, and what about putting those players out of work? Our union here in LA is currently picketing the Pantages Theatre for using a "virtual orchestra." I mean no offense to you, Hiro. I just hate to see musicians losing work to samplers. Perhaps in the (hopefully very far!) future people will forget what real instruments sound like. I hope I'm dead and gone by then, because that will be a very sad day.
All the best to all,
Lon
******************************************** Lon Price, Los Angeles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://hometown.aol.com/txstnr/>
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