Hey Chris,
Thanks for the follow up. Let me address your points.
On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 08:46:49PM +0100, Chris Cannam wrote:
> ("[t]he notation editor in Rosegarden might one day start to become
> usable, but right now it's one of the most frustratingly poor programs
> I've used").
I kinda wish I had explained that comment a bit better. Linus is
quick to remind people that it's silly to make absolute evaluations of
software. Rather, when we evaluate software, we should keep in mind
out goals. I don't think RG fits well with my goals - but I didn't
mean to say that it was a crummy program. Let me explain.
> I get the impression from your posts here that your problems have been
> mostly what may be technically relatively minor troubles (though with
> their subtleties) in Rosegarden that affect you seriously because they
> are in conflict with the ways of working that you find natural.
Well, yes and no. Lots of them are relatively small and subtle
issues. I tried to learn to work with RG so I wasn't fighting those
things so much. But I some of the design of Rosegarden's notation
editor is kind of fundamentally contrary to how I want to work.
The Rosegarden documentation is very clear that it is a compromise
between sequencing/composition editors and score/layout editors. I'm
100% a user of the first. Rarely do I care about typesetting a score.
As a result, all the features and facets that make the score/layout
editing work, are frustrating to me.
One part of why I disappeared from the mailing lists was that the
more I used RG, the more I realized that this was going to continually
be an issue. And hey - I'm not the only user! I'm not going to come
into your mailing lists and demand that your software be redesigned in
my image. There's obviously lots of people using it because they need
to layout a score and it's not fair to them to have me undermining
their productivity, and your project.
> * What Michael says is true -- there are no track-level defaults.
> That's because they're at instrument level, not track level.
> Conceptually this probably is still the level you're looking for.
The instrument level defaults would be good enough, except that now I
have to manage segments and what their properties are. This is a
completely new task that I've never done with MIDI or notation before
- it feels like extra complexity and work I don't want to do.
I want each track to automatically behave as if it always had
one segment, however long as it needed to be to accomodate all
the events I have placed.
> * Clef currently exists as an event, it can change, and it has a
> default of treble if no clef is set within a segment. There is no
> instrument or segment default.
I came to make peace with this - I wasn't expecting it to behave quite
that way, though it makes sense a typesetter would need it. This issue
came up while I was trying to learn to use the segments
effectively.
Suppose I am writing a bass part. I add a segment for the first
chunk, I add a segment for the second chunk, etc. Some notes are
added to the first chunk, and then copied to the second segment.
Unless I have manually set both segments to bass clef, they read
differently, despite not having a clef shown to indicate the change.
This was very confusing until it was explained to me.
> I don't imagine that the lack of a track-level default clef is the cause
> of all your problems. Can you summarise the things that are causing
> you grief?
There are two major things that are causing me grief:
1) Me. A big part of my foray into RG was soured by the fact that I
was intentionally trying to stay out of the software development side.
Since I left Cakewalk back with Windows a long time ago, I'm often
frustrated when I sit down to write music at how I get pulled into
writing software instead. Or bug reports. Or everything but music.
As a result, my composition has been sadly unproductive for the past
few years. I set out looking to avoid that, which is an unrealistic goal.
Also, I have a lot of habits that I'm loathe to break. Cakewalk had a
very simple, but elegant notation editor. It focused on making entry,
auditioning, and modification as simple as possible. It did this by
estimating notation based on MIDI events.
The notation was often crude, very caught up in MIDI technology, and
produced pretty awful prints. But man, I could sit down and bang out
a whole song in an evening. RGs design is more involved than one of
these simple sequencing models. But that baggage just doesn't fit well
with me.
2) The layout engine requires far too much interaction. I don't know
that I ever wrote a measure in RG that I didn't have to Normalize
Rests and then Auto-Beam. It wouldn't be so bad if RG would produce
something sensible (but ugly) without those steps. But skipping them
leaves non-sense. Why don't they happen automatically after every
event is entered?
Rests actually exist. In Cakewalk, there's no such thing as a rest.
The space between your events is rendered with rests because there's
nothing there. You can't select them, copy them, delete them, etc.
With RG I have to be very careful not to accidently get a rest when I
don't want it, because if I do, it counts as something. I also have
to be very careful when adding events to make sure the rests end up
correct. And lots of the time, when editing an event, I have to break
up rest that follows it so the layout engine will allow me to change
the length of the event. All of this just seems to slow me down.
Basically, I think that RG and I have some unreconcilable differences.
It's a shame, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm one user with
pretty particular wants and desires. It's pretty comparable to the
way I use word-processing software. I like LaTeX because it handles
layout for me - I don't even have to worry about margins, fonts,
kerning, or anything like that. But someone doing graphic layout
obviously needs control over those things! It just seems like RG
isn't quite the tool for my job.
--
Ross Vandegrift
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who
make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians
have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine
man in the bonds of Hell."
--St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37
-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies
from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles,
informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to
speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click
_______________________________________________
Rosegarden-devel mailing list
[email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
