On 5 Jul 2005 at 18:25, Tyler Turner wrote: []
> 2. It was mentioned that Finale's playback has now > caught up to and in some ways perhaps exceeded that of > Sibelius. There's no competition. Finale's playback is > far beyond Sibelius', both in terms of automatic > playback and in customizability. For what you get > included with the program, Sibelius doesn't come > close. Sibelius gives you 20 instruments and the > ability to load 8 of them. Finale gives you 100 higher > quality instruments, and the ability to load 64. Human > Playback is far beyond Espressivo, and is optimized to > work with GPO. As alluring as linked parts is to the > engraving crowd, I guarantee you that the inclusion of > Finale GPO will attract more users than anything > Sibelius has included in their new version. That this may very well be true suggests to me one distressing fact: Fewer and fewer people are actually creating music to be performed by live musicians. Good computer-based playback means you don't need human beings. While Dennis may think this is A Good Thing, I think it's very distressing -- perhaps the beginning of the end of live performance as anything other than a hobby/curiosity. [] > 4. A mixer was a highly requested feature long before > Finale included its own sounds, and with good reason. > Many people make their files for their own personal > use, and the fact that they might play differently on > a different person's equipment matters little . . . But then the mixer belongs in your *sequencer*, not in Finale. > . . . - they > still want to balance them so that they can hear their > work. If this wasn't a valued feature, than thousands > of people wouldn't have used the MIDI Tool and > Expression Tools for this task all these years. And of > course, for people that did want to share their > recordings, they've always been able to do this via > free recording software. If I were creating my MIDI files for performance on a single synthesizer, I certainly wouldn't be using Finale to tweak it for performance, mixer or not. It makes no sense to me to do it that way for a carefully tuned performance, given that Finale's tools are just not designed to make it very easy to do these things. Yes, I use Finale to do lots of MIDI work, but only GM performances, not carefully detailed final-quality renditions. If I wanted to do that, I certainly wouldn't want to work within the straitjacket that Finale's horrid UI (especially for continuous data) provides. Replacing that with a mixer still wouldn't do it for me, as I don't like that as an UI for continuous data, anyway (I think it shapes, and would like to be able to draw the shapes for the volume changes). But, again, I agree that once Finale has its own built-in sounds, then, yes, a mixer is an appropriate tool to have built into the program. I just don't think it belonged there before that point. I also think that Human Playback also increases the level of necessity of having a mixer built into Finale, but that's something I haven't experienced firsthand (except very briefly for a 45-minute transposition job I did last August in California for the performance of Handel's Alcina I was playing continuo in). -- 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
