On 5 Jul 2005 at 21:57, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 05 Jul 2005, at 9:45 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > You're saying that Quicktime could output to a wave format? > > I believe you could convert MIDI files to AIFF files using QuickTime > Pro -- or even (I think) iTunes. As I said, I'm not 100% sure about > this because I never tried it myself, but if I recall correctly, some > of the people on this list have done this.
Well, I'm testing right iTunes's conversion of MIDI to MP3. That's not everything I'd want (I'd want a non-lossy version of the WAV file for burning to CD), but it's a start. Well, it seems iTunes uses the wrong synthesier (it seems to have chosen the MS wavetable soft synth, which sucks evern worse than Quicktime musical instruments), so it's useless for my purposes. But, in any event, what needs to be processed is a MIDI file, and there's nothing restricting the user to Finale for that. > >> . . . But without a mixer *in Finale*, it was > >> impossible to set appropriate levels for the individual > >> instruments. > > > > Impossible? How so? If Finale could play back through Quicktime > > musical instruments, why couldn't you then set balances and edit > > continuous data in Finale? > > Well, okay, "impossible" is too strong a word, but having a proper > mixer is far preferable to editing continuous data, which is why it > was such a popular feature request. Well, I don't think the critical mass was there in Finale to justify the time spent on implementing a mixer in Finale until Finale was much more closely tied to the output format. > > Or, open your MIDI file in a real sequencer and tweak it to sound > > good on Quicktime musical instruments, before using Quicktime to > > create the wave output? > > Yes, sure, that would work, but you could do that with the Finale > Sound Font too. A built-in mixer is useful in both cases for the same > reasons. Er, you could *not* do it *before* the Finale sound font existed. That's entirely my point -- before that point, there was no justification for having a mixer inside Finale. Once that was provided for playback along with Finale (and, I'd argue, Human Playback was included), a mixer became pretty important, because Finale *was* your playback mechanism (I'm perhaps wrongly assuming that you can't play back a MIDI with the Finale soundfont from a program outside Finale). -- 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
