dhbailey wrote:
David W. Fenton wrote:
[snip]
I tried it out in the Finale 2005 demo. It feels a lot like
Sibelius's standard keypad entry method.
And that means I HATE IT. I don't think that way about getting the
information into Finale, and that's one of the reasons I can't use
Sibelius.
It slows me down incredibly to think through which things I want to
attach to a note after it's been entered (or before, if you can
forecast that).
For me (and I said FOR ME), a pass to get notes and rhythms entered
is VERY FAST, and then I can go back and entered the
articulations/expressions, set beam breaks, stem direction and
correct enharmonics. I do all of the latter in a single pass, in fact.
And that's the way I did it in Speedy with no MIDI keyboard. I just
don't think in a way that allows me to be constantly switching
between so many different kinds of entry. The notes and rhythms come
first as a framework for the whole piece, and then the rest of the
data is editing or entirely cosmetic.
Perhaps I'm stuck in that mindset because I've been doing it that way
for over 15 years.
I'm with you on this point David -- I find that I can fly through note
entry and then go back and do the expressions and articulations on a
second and third pass and can work very fast.
Every time I have to change something while in the middle of the basic
note entry, as has to happen in Simple Entry if one is trying to enter
the articulations at the same time as the notes, it really slows my
workflow down.
What's terrific about Finale is that there are the two entry methods,
simple and speedy.
And speedy is what works best to my mind (for me, I'm not claiming it
should be this way for anybody else) which is why I can't work quickly
or efficiently in Sibelius.
Just yesterday, my son was staying after school to help a young woman
transpose an english horn part so she could play it on her oboe
(octave displacement not being a consideration), and they were using
the music department computer which has Sibelius on it. They managed
to get the english horn part copied just as it was on the page and
couldn't figure out how to get it changed for oboe.
so they called me. Now in finale, just a couple of mouse clicks to
change the key signature and have the notes transpose upward and they
would have been all set in a couple of seconds. In sibelius, nowhere
in the manual is there an entry for changing the key signature for
music already entered. So I had to fly by the seat of my pants and
triple-click to enclose the entire staff, then get three menu levels
deep to the tranpose dialogue, and set things in there. took much
longer. I realize that some of that was because I had to figure out
how to do it without the help of the manual, but now that I know how
to do it, it will still take much longer than using Finale's key
signature tool.
Why Finale felt they needed to make their note entry mimic Sibelius'
is beyond me. But thank goodness they left speedy entry alone!
Whether it's an ingrained pattern of workflow from using Finale for so
long I can't tell, but I do know that it took me very little time to
convert from MusicPrinterPlus to Finale and it's taken me ages to try
to convert to Sibelius and I still can't do it, my mind just doesn't
work that way.
Well said, David(s). I think this has much to do with how one thinks and
prefers to work with music. I have said for some time that Sibelius
thinks like I do. You guys obviously have the same response to Finale
(and Speedy Entry). Why change? The software or the method is not the
goal, just the tool.
For whatever it's worth, David B., I agree that Finale's transposition
method is more direct which is a mild annoyance for me. I often just do
the transposition the old fashioned way, transpose the interval and
change the key.
Richard Smith
www.rgsmithmusic.com
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