On 9 Sep 2005 at 17:19, Chuck Israels wrote: > Degrees? 90 degrees left? 60 degrees right? 0 degrees = center. > (By now, you have all figured out that I don't know how to get the > symbol for degrees on my keyboard.) W - N - E?
Well, the problem is that you've got 180 degrees and 128 MIDI values, so degrees would be more precise than any MIDI value you could produce. Percentages have the same problem, when you use 100% for right and 100% for left, since you end up with 200 degrees of freedom, where the actual MIDI data has only 128. False precision is one of the problems with percentages, and degrees has some of the same problem. But, it is really no different than using -32 to represent halfway between left and center. > That would make some sense to me, but it's not so difficult for me to > learn another set of numbers that represent those positions, so I'm > much less concerned with this issue than I am with other, more > functionally troublesome aspects of Finale. I don't see that using the actual MIDI values is hard, so I can't quite understand why there's a need to change it in the first place. > After all, I learned what those crazy EVPU numbers meant, just by > using them. (If I remember correctly, in early versions of Finale, > they were the only units of measurement available.) I'm so used to > them now, that an attempt to change to the"more intuitive" spaces > caused more trouble than it was worth. EVPUs have exactly the same kinds of problems as using a percentage for pan. Take the tempo tool. or the dialog you use for controlling where in a measure a performance-defined measure expression has its effect. You start with beat 1, and beat 1.5 is the 2nd 8th note of the measure. Again, you end up with a representation that doesn't make any sense in musical results. It's because you're trying to work with continuous data as though it is discreet. EVPUs in a measure at least has the virtue of starting from zero, as time does. Consider: what if you used percentages of a measure to determine where something occurred. That would be wrong, and for exactly the same reasons that precentages are conceptually wrong to pan, however common such a construction may be in certain computer programs (that I don't use). -- 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
