On 5 Jul 2005 at 18:56, dhbailey wrote: > Sibelius 4 has been announced, and one aspect which we have clamored > for on this list for years is in their list of added features: > Dynamic linking of parts to the score. Apparently you only have to > change things in the score, and the changes are reflected in the > parts. I know no more about it, but thought I would let you folks > know about it and give you this link. But it does allow the user to > tweak certain things in the parts which don't show up in the score, so > nudging of items for better legibility won't affect the score but can > make the parts more legible. It sounds like a glorified Special Parts > Extraction, where each part is maintained in its own layout, unlike > Finale, where whatever layout changes are made in special parts > extraction affect the score as well. . . .
I have always felt that the easiest way for Finale to get "linked parts" (I hesitate to use that expression, since it seems tied into the in my opinion erroneous idea that the parts should be in separate files, linked back to a score file) was to fix special part extraction so that the layout changes for each part were stored as deltas from the score layout. > . . . There is a flash movie which > supposedly shows how it all works: > > http://www.sibelius.com/products/sibelius/4/dynamicparts.html A very impressive demo, I think. But, of course, the devil is in the details! > If Finale doesn't start listening to its core users and stop dicking > around with fancy playback issues, it's going to lose the entire > educational and professional market, plain and simple. > > Let's hope that Finale2006 has this feature, too! Wait, I just > checked, and it's nowhere to be seen. But they're making it easy to > use GPO -- wow! Incredible, just what every engraver needs! And wait > a minute more, there's a new MIXER panel, something I've seen every > engraver clamor for time and again. Well, I do think that the ability to create good-sounding MP3 demos direct from Finale is a big plus. It's something that, had it been there all along, would have saved me a lot of time and effort (I use Midi2Wav to capture the output from my Turtle Beach sound card' quite decent wavetable synthesizers) over the years. But I definitely agree that non-extracted parts would save me *much* more time than the built-in playback enhancements. > I am beginning to fear for Finale's continued well-being -- those of > us on this list who care about GPO probably already have it! And > those of us who don't have it probably don't really care about > it. . . . Well, I'd love to have some of its sounds, but I must say I was distinctly underwhelmed by many of the demos on the Garritan page. Many of the solo instruments sound no better than my old Turtle Beach sound card, which manages to produce these sounds without requiring GBs of RAM to do it. No, the orchestral sounds are not as good, and no there isn't the variety of articulations and so forth, but for the my money, the solo instruments are not enough better to justify the expense (of course, I'd also need a new computer). > . . . So > why integrate it with Finale (and add the cost to the product when > many don't want/need it) when something which would truly make getting > the music onto paper (oh, let's not forget, TEXTURED paper on-screen! > Will it print like that, I wonder?) like linked score/parts isn't > included. Well, I think the "textured paper" feature is a very good one (though I hate the name of it), allowing you to choose a background for the editing windows, which is a very good thing. It's also absolutely trivial to implament, in comparison to any of the other features you've mentioned. I think MakeMusic should be improving Finale on *both* fronts -- enhancing Finale's ability to produce good-sounding music, as well as enhancing fundamental engraving features. > On the more realistic side of things, the jury will be out on > Sibelius' linked parts/score for a while, since it, too, may just be > another marketing ploy which won't work very well. I kind of doubt > that, though -- Sibelius' developpers seem to be a lot more on the > ball these days in meeting users' needs/wishes than Finale's > developpers are. The demo sure sounded to me like somebody has been listening in on our conversations here over the years! > But Sibelius is taking a large leap forward while all the new stuff I > read about Finale2006 is just so much fluff and nonsense aimed at > turning a notation product into a sequencer. I see very little which > is actually new in Finale2006, especially given that half the new > stuff is done with plug-ins that third-parties have written. It'll be > interesting to see how the new mid-measure repeats business works and > whether or not it will adjust the measure numbers appropriately. Isn't it just implemented as a plug-in? Measure number regions are a real pain. Here's one I ran onto today, while combining separate movements into a single file: If you add a new region, when you create it, it appears to inherit all the settings of the previous region you were working on, but, instead, it just doesn't update the display. When you close the dialog, you find that it's actually inherited the default settings for measure number formatting. Second, there are problems with the measure-number display that I haven't quite traced down. It takes two or three trips to the region editing dialog before the numbers start actually displaying what you've told them to Perhaps those bugs have been fixed in a newer version of Finale, but why in the hell are they there in the first place? Doesn't anyone test these things? It always seemed to me that measure numbers and repeats ought to be something you edited in a separate graphical window, one that represented the piece at a very high level, so you could see the basic structure. To me, dragging a repeat back to its target and dropping it there would be an intuitive interface for doing it (assuming it couldn't guess it correctly, based on just hunting back for the previous graphical repeat sign of the type you told it to look for). Wrapping it all in a plug-in with a complicated dialog box as front end really doesn't cut it -- it just makes the underlying complexities a little more obvious. Of course, I'm complaining about an implementation I haven't even seen yet, so it should all be taken with a bag of salt. But given the past history, I wouldn't be surprised to see it implemented in this fashion. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
