On Sep 16, 2005, at 6:56 AM, Williams, Jim wrote:
1. The ossia tool 2. The mirror tool
I think I tried these way back when (v 3.x?) and found them awkward, so I developed alternate habits. I used to do a lot of older opera transcriptions so I actually did several ossias for cadenzas, but I still found it easier to make a separate staff and do various little kludges to make it appear properly.
3. The tempo tool
Never used.
4. The MIDI tool
I have little interest in playback, and no interest in sophisticated playback, but I do nevertheless use the Midi tool occasionally. Some of my clients, including the one I did the bulk of my professional work for, want rudimentary playback to work -- nothing fancy, just the play the right notes. The Midi tool was often the simplest way to correct little playback problems. Most significantly, I routinely use it to make classic appoggiaturas play back properly. This is a pretty basic need, and if there's a better way to handle it than in the Midi tool, I don't know it. Similarly, I'll also occasionally use the same tool to correct the playback when a visually tricky passage is best addressed with kludges that would otherwise play back incorrectly.
I don't mind the user-unfriendliness. I can see why it would bother others, though. It's rather cold and mathematical. Personally, I don't mind typing in note values as EDUs, and once you understand the odd logic of the numbers it's rational and does what I tell it to do, but that is a bit of an initial barrier to making it work. I can also see how it would be inefficient if you had a lot of edits to make, but I only ever use it to change a few notes here and there, so that's not a problem for me either.
By the way, the only part of the Midi tool I ever use is the window that lets you change start and stop times of individual notes. The rest of it I never touch.
============ 5. The rhyming dictionary 6. The Band-in-a-Box harmonizer.
Never use these. They seem like useless frills to me, but to each his own.
mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
