On 31 Jul 2005 at 16:22, Craig Parmerlee wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > >On 31 Jul 2005 at 1:32, Craig Parmerlee wrote: > > > >[re: GPO:] > > > >>For people who are willing to > >>spend hours fiddling with their equipment in order to make the most > >>realistic rendering of a symphony orchestra, maybe it has some > >>merit. > > > >First off, I don't have Finale 2006, and couldn't use the GPO > >instruments if I did, but it seems pretty clear to me from the > >comments on the list that the fiddling with GPO comes when you try to > > take an existing file *not* created with the GPO templates and then > >try to convert it to use GPO. > > Unless you want to do something more than sit back and admire the > beauty of your creation. If you are trying to share the score and > send MIDI demos over the net, for example, you are going to be farting > around a lot with those files. . . .
Well, I think that's a misplaced concern. Any Finale file that has been tweaked in any way for a particular synthesizer's sound set (GM or not) is not going to produce a completely portable MIDI file. For instance, I replaced my original Turtle Beach soundcard with a newer model a few years back. One of the two synthesizers on my new soundcard was supposed to have identical wave samples as the old synthesizer it replaced. But some things were changed, like the orchestral pizz was substantially louder and the default french horn was much weaker. To get the same results from the new synthesizer I had to send specific commands to get the old variations on the basic sounds that were there, but not available by default. The result was that my playback worked, but a MIDI file created for my own synthesizer wouldn't necessarily work on someone else's synthesizer. This kind of thing has been a reality as long as MIDI has existed. It is only with the widespread use of a common sound set (such as Quicktime Musical Instruments) that tweaks specific to a particular synthesizer become usable in a generic MIDI file. Now, the inclusing of the Finale Soundfont meant you now had a common playback platform (however inadequate) that every Finale user had, and you could tweak your performance to work best on the Finale Soundfont. But, again, the MIDI version would still not necessarily work well for people who did *not* have the Finale Soundfont. So, of course, the real way for distributing one of these performances tweaked to get the most out of a particular synthesizer was to produce some form of WAV output format. I don't know exactly how Finale did it, but I assume you saved as WAV on Windows and as AIFF on Mac, and then you could take that waveform and produce an MP3 file for sharing with others. So, all this longwinded discussion aside, it seems that anyone at any point who was thinking they could distribute a Finale file that has been carefully tweaked for performance on a particular synthesizer was thinking wrong -- those people all along should have been producing MP3 files to allow people to hear the music at its best. > . . . Not to mention the fact that it is > simply missing sounds that 90% of us would consider essential: sax, > bass, electric piano, guitar, etc. And also not to mention that the > metronome doesn't play when the template sets up the file. I'm sure > there must be an easy way around that one, but with all the other GPO > problems, I don't have any motivation to look. Those are flaws in the current Finale GPO implementation that, along with the inability to save as a waveform, make it impossible to get to the MP3 output that you could share. But my understanding is that the save-as ommission will be fixed in a maintenance release, and that many people are lobbying MakeMusic to correct the lack of saxophonoes in the Finale GPO set in a maintenance release (I don't know about the other instruments -- there was a good reason MM couldn't include sax in the initial release, because Garritan didn't have it ready). > In the past I have run my MIDI files through the Roland VSC. It > supports ALL the GM instruments and sounds pretty darned good and > requires ZERO adjustments to my Finale score. With a HP-endowed MIDI > file and VSC, I just don't see a lot of benefit with GPO. It sounds > like a 1% difference to me for a LOT of extra work. Well, I think that it *shouldn't* be a lot of extra work, but you only get that benefit with new files. My beef is that MakeMusic has designed into their new version of Finale specific functionality that favors a particular technology, one that is a performance hog, and that is so specific in its setup that older files are hard to adapt for it. And the maximum potentional of HP is realizable only when you use this new technology. I'm not too concerned about GPO support. My concern is that those of us who won't use GPO will have a second- class version of HP. HP should be opened up to allow the end user to adapt the way it works to one's particular synthesizer. If that were the case, yes, it's more work out of the box than the included GPO, but at least it would be a one-time setup that would then give you as much of the flexibility of GPO HP as your own synthesizer happened to support. -- 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
