www.noteheads.com is still there. You can download a demo of Igor,
which has sadly not been updated for quite a long time (there's no Mac
OSX version). You can even apparently buy it for 295 USD. There are
lots of excellent ideas in Igor: it's well worth looking at it just to
inspire feature request ideas for Finale!
I don't think Igor was killed off by the new owners: I think the
original Igor team just bit off more than they could chew. They
proclaimed loud and clear that they were making the best notation
program ever, that it would wipe out the competition, that they could
program anything in next to no time using the Common Lisp language
(although Igor is painfully slow and buggy). Here's a snippet from a
message from the management from 22 November, 1999:
- Igor, wipes out the competition
As all of you already know we are very delayed in our launch plan and
development of Igor. In fact
we have been delayed so many times that some of you don't believe
that Igor exists.
Nevertheless, since the beginning of 1999, we have been able to demo
Igor to selected
audiences. Everyone we have been talking to during this period agrees
that Igor will wipe out
everything else on the market. So, even if you need to wait, we hope
that you understand that the
reason is that we like to give you the best music notation tool ever.
For several months in 1999 there was a "comparison of features" on the
Noteheads website, comparing Igor to Finale, Nightingale and Mosaic. It
looked incredible. Igor could apparently do everything: tuplets over
barlines, integrated quarter and sixth tones, cut scores, intelligent
playback, automatic collision detection, page turns, whatever. There
was just a small snag: they were talking about a program that didn't
yet exist (Igor "Pro" version 2.0) and that, six years later, still
doesn't.
Around March 2000 they brought out a first, extremely buggy version and
explained that Igor was freeware and would always be so:
Igor Engraver is freeware. No matter the version. Igor
Engraver will continue to be freeware in the future.
They were hoping to make lots of money selling music digitally through
the Internet. Of course that bubble burst, so they decided to go back
on the "freeware" decision. Then they couldn't sell enough copies of a
program full of great ideas but too slow and buggy to be a practical
alternative to Finale and friends.
I think the original Igor team had great ideas but were too arrogant to
listen to good advice. The company was then bought by people who
obviously had money, but apparently lacked ideas. There's still an
"Igor-Talk" list: you can look at the archives at www.noteheads.com and
see that somebody just posted a message about the new version of
Sibelius...
A cautionary tale.
Best wishes,
Michael Cook
On 14 Jul 2005, at 00:32, Gerhard Torges, geb. Hölscher wrote:
Hello!
Am 06.07.2005 um 13:04 schrieb John Abram:
Igor was such a great fledgeling programme.
...
A tragedy it was effectively killed off by the new owners before it
was fully functional...
Did I miss something?
New owners?
Hmm. noteheads.com seems to have vanished.
Gerhard
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