Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Finale 2001


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Posted by Klaus on September 03, 2001 at 02:11:40:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Finale 2001 posted by Chuck(G) on September 02, 2001 at 19:10:10:

This is one of the more analyticall and reflective posts on this thread. Even if I do not agree on its conclusions.

I have worked in Finale for a bit over 10 years. Only upgrading regularly for the last fewer years.

Finale comes with a set of tutorials, where teaching in book form is combined with a foundation of premade files to work on. Anyone taking his/hers time to work through these tutorials will get a quite reasonable foundation for working in Finale.

Back in 1991 I invested about 8 hours in these tutorials and immedialtely was able to work on large scores in the 20 staves range.

I most specifically am not a person of the codewriting type (never ever wrote even one single line), whereas I rarely am challenged, when it comes to thinking intuetively along logic and even mathematical lines.

For me Finale is a perfect application, because it has its own strict inner logic. Which has been honed through the yearly upgrades.

Combined with a quite primitive software attempt to mimic one of the few points, where the Wintel world surpasses the Mac ditto in anything but quantity and bulk, I have set up a series of keyboard shortcuts, which makes my work in Finale mostly a keyboard affair. Of course involving both MIDI and alfanumerical such ones.

I have also a demo of Sibelius 1.4. Making it possible for me to read Sibelius files and to work on them except for saving and printing. I do not like, what I see. And I yet have to be presented to more than even one single Sibelius feature, except for immediate accessability for amateurs, which is not surpassed by Finale.

Finale can present some superficial unfriendliness. But it gives serious users immense numbers of opportunities to choose one way or anothers to solve basic engraving problematics. Which should take into consideration the importance spacing has on the eyeflow of the reading musician.

A factor which is fully user controllable in Finale. And which is automatized down to cretinism in Sibelius.

Scorch might be a fine idea. It does not work on my setup. NotePad by the Finale company has its severe shortcomings as an engraver in its own right. But it is a quite faithful, not to say a fully such one, reader/printer/player application for Finale files. Free for the download time from the codamusic.com site.

And NotePad is not that bad as an engraver. A Windows based fellow contributor to this board, on my lead, downloaded NotePad. And took the chance to engrave some of his arrangements. Which sadly, due to copywright rulings, can not be made available to all of you. I am working on some minor editorial tweekings on these files, which are available in Finale as contrasted to the free NotePad.

For the sake of honesty I will admit Sibelius a very, very few advantages over Finale. It can, however, be counted on the finger of one hand. Sitting on a person who very carelessly has spent a lifetime working on a sawmill.

The Finale online community, as contrasted to the Sibelius ditto, is an open one. It recently ran a thread on how to flare the ulcer of a Sibelius salesman by presenting him to the shortcommings of the socalled commodity, he was expected to get over the counter. My posting might be long. But nothing in that comparison.

Klaus

PS: Should I open myself up to your judgement then by presenting an arrangement for tuba soli and Brit style brass band. Downloadable for free from the link below. An improved version for brass 5-tet is in the works. So please let the presented one stay, where it is. Also the arrangement of Vivaldi Largo could be of minor to none interest of most of you. This wicked tweaking of mine might pose an undue challenge to the players of the 2nd euph and 1st tuba parts. The file format is .pdf readable by the free for the download Adobe Acrobat Reader.



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