At 05:44 PM 10/5/06 -0700, Steve Schow wrote: >These days, Finale actually *IS* the program that has come to closest to >filling this whole. With plugins and notation and Human playback..it >truly is the closest thing to being an ideal composer's tool. Nothing >else is there.
Unfortunately, that's not even the case with Finale, which is what I meant in my previous email. If you're exclusively a "pen and ink" composer working in 19th century notation, Finale may be close. I'm not of those, nor are thousands of others. About a third of what I write is electroacoustic, for which I have to use several programs and a pretty big chunk of utility audio (Sonar, Audio Mulch, CSound, Cecilia, Coagula, Midimage, Wavesurfer, SMS Tools, Prie, The Voice, ixi modules, AnalogX modules, some 400 VST and DX plugins...). Finale doesn't understand anything at all about that genre nor how to integrated it (even as a sound wave file) into the score. And the rest of what I do uses post-1920s notation which, although Finale is the best of the programs for doing this, stymies every program in handling it as normal notation -- which it has been for the better part of a century. We end up reverting to graphics. Finale can't even do staggered barlines natively or beaming across barlines without Robert's plugin or make any item stretchable as has been possible in every other vector-based program for years. I very much appreciate what you say about needing a true composer's toolkit. I'm still waiting for pen-recognition input to Finale, which would beat the pants off any other input method for me, or even lasso/drag/drop! (Every time I think of why I bought Finale in the early 1990s expecting these 'normal' functions would shortly be available...) Dennis -- Please participate in my latest project: http://maltedmedia.com/waam/ My blog: http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
