Finale, was Re: [linux-audio-user] NoteEdit-2.5.0 : Octaviation (va-lines)

[Chris Cannam]

On Friday 12 Mar 2004 10:22 pm, Mikhail Ramendik wrote:
> Actually, there seems to be a general contention among many Linux
> developers that non-WYSIWYG solutions produce better results
> (notably Lilypond).
>
> The big problem I see here is that many of these developers (with
> the notable exception of Joerg Anders who is present here) are more
> of the "programmer" type and do not understand traditional
> musicians.

That seems a peculiar statement, unless you're just commenting that a 
programmer is unlikely to be a "traditional" musician.  If you read 
the interview I just posted at linuxmusician.com with the Lilypond 
developers, it's pretty clear that they not only think about what 
musicians and composers need, but are themselves active classical 
musicians.  And also they do appear to acknowledge that Lilypond is 
not a program that's intended to be directly usable for composition.

The difficulty with something like Finale is that it tries to blur the 
line: it's a score typesetting tool, but it looks like a 
compositional tool.  That makes it rather suboptimal for both, but if 
you are a composer who wants to edit score as score and then be able 
to typeset it, and you want to do that in a single program, then you 
do seem to need something rather like it.

> I would need line
> wrapping (so that more than one line of previously entered notes
> would be visible)

fwiw, Rosegarden-4 does continuous page (one infinitely tall 
screen-width page) and multiple page (WYSIWYG) score editing as well 
as its linear left-right scrolling layout.  It doesn't support as 
many notational bits and bobs as NoteEdit though.

> and certain neat automation (notably beams)

What do you mean by automation?


Chris