On 5 Jul 2005 at 22:43, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 05 Jul 2005, at 10:27 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > 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). > > I believe you *can* play back a MIDI file with the Finale soundfont > from a separate sequencer. It's a standard soundfont and I think you > can use it in any situation you'd use any other soundfont.
Er, what format is it in? What software synthesizers can play back using it? > From the user's standpoint, the only thing that's changed is who > supplies the soundfont -- Apple (in the case of QuickTime instruments) > or Coda. . . . This just doesn't seem right to me. There has to be a synthesiver t load the soundfont into, since a soundfont is only a description of the waveforms involved, not the mechanism for playing it back. Quicktime instruments don't play back without Quicktime, so I'd assume that the Finale Soundfont can't be played back by anything but Finale, unless it's in a compatible format that other software synthesizers support. > . . . And a mixer is a desirable thing to have regardless of who > supplies the soundfont. . . I think your Mac orientation has caused you to have an incomplete map of the parts of the process. On Windows, it's historically been hardware that supplies the sound, an add-on piece of hardware originally, but in recent years, every PC has some kind of hardware synthesizer in it (poor as most of them may be). As CPU cycles have become cheaper and RAM more plentiful, there is more use of software synthesizers, but none of the simple ones are even close to my 7-year-old Turtle Beach sound card in terms of quality of sound. Now, shortly after I bought that, the whole landscape changed, and hardware soundcards stopped having the wavetables permantently burned into ROM chips on the card, and instead had the ability to load a set of wavetables from files (soundfonts). Unfortunately, Turtle Beach chose the format that didn't get widespread support, so my soundcard's capabilities in this regard are basically useless. GPO, on the other hand, takes that a step further and eliminates the hardware soundcard from the synthesizing equation entirely (though the D/A converter may very well be on a dedicated sound card or dedicated sound chip on the motherboard). The Finale Soundfont, from my understanding, is similar to GPO in that Finale sends output to a software synthesizer (provided with Finale) that uses the Finale Soundfont for its sounds. I don't know if the software synthesizer that comes with Finale can be used outside of Finale, or if the Finale soundfont is in a format that can be loaded into other software synthesizers that use the same format for their soundfonts. > . . . I agree that recent changes to Finale's > playback (especially Human Playback) have made a mixer even *more* > desireable, but I have no reason to doubt the Coda employees (and > ex-employees) who have told me that there has been overwhelming demand > for a mixer for several years now. Well, I still say that until the point that Human Playback and the Finale soundfont were added, there was really no justification for a mixer in Finale. Once those were there, the mixer was, in my opinion, essential. > (Also, I think you can save MIDI files as uncompressed audio [WAV or > AIFF] in iTunes if you adjust your default import options.) You're right about that. I didn't see that. I don't like the iTunes terminology, as I'm not really using iTunes the way it was intended to be used. I'm not "importing" anything "into iTunes," I'm just using iTunes to manage my files and play them back. So, because of that, the options dialog didn't make much sense to me. -- 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
