John Howell wrote:
At 4:04 PM -0500 3/19/05, dhbailey wrote:
There is a way to do what you want, it's just that Finale programmers haven't figured out how to do it. :-(
My bet is the first notation software which does that (Sibelius, Finale or the newly developping Notion software from http://www.notionmusic.com which may give these two giants a run for their money) first will eventually be the last engraving software standing. It will be such a huge time-saver that everybody using anything else will jump ship and begin using that program.
Sadly, not at all the case. Composer's Mosaic did exactly this, automatically and instantaneously, from the very beginning. The key may have been that score and parts are all part of the same file.
The downside, of course, is that a mistake entered in EITHER score or parts is instantly transferred to the other, so checking the score for an error in the parts is a waste of time.
But MotU seem no longer to be supporting Mosaic, despite this ability. My son-in-law was smart enough to get it operable for me in OSX Classic, so I can (for the moment) still access hundreds of my scores, but soon I'll inevitably lose them. Dennis' fear of losing access to Finale is NOT paranoid!
john
Good point -- Composer's Mosaic was before it's time, unfortunately, when not nearly as many composers were as computer-savvy as they are today and there was still much hand-copying being done.
As for Dennis' fear of losing access to Finale, I agree, it's not paranoid. But copy protection isn't what has done Mosaic in, it's the advancing OS which has left the old code in the dust and the developper of Mosaic decided to pull the plug on the program. Nothing will be able to save Finale into the future once either Windows or MacOS move onto 128-bit programming and the then-current versions won't run any 16-bit apps anymore.
That could happen to open-source freeware as easily as to corporate-developped expensive software.
It's good your son-in-law got Mosaic working for you -- go about saving them all as midi files so you can import them into Finale, as well as making certain you have printed versions of them all. You might even consider printing them to PDF files so you'll have electronic versions rather than paper versions.
As I recall, also, Composer's Mosaic was a Mac program, not a Windows program, which cut out a huge potential market, another factor contributing to it's downfall.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
