Re: Joy of Klez--unsolicited praise

[R.A.S. <richards...>]

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On 09/01/2003 at 21:11 Richard Schoeller wrote:

>Of course the problem with Sibelius or Finale format is that you would
>have to be using a computer that can run programs that can deal with

Sure, but if you're going to be obtaining these materials (in whatever
form) _online_, you'd have to have a computer in the first place, or at
least easy access. Shouldn't be too much hassle then to obtain the relevant
software (if it's not already available). Granted, Sibelius has a
relatively steep price tag.. But generally, Sibelius and, to a lesser
extent Finale are in pretty ubiquitous use these days, and the former
happens to have become the "industry standard". And the great flexibility
and veratility of these programs could save people an awful lot of work and
ultimately even expense.

>those formats.  The nice thing about PDF or MIDI is that support for
>them is that support for them is ubiquitous.

Sure. In the end, it's a toss-up between ubiquitous support and greater
flexibility and versatility, at least from an end-user perspective.

>Of course MIDI doesn't retain the typesetting information and PDF

Midi can be very awkward actually. The only app that seems to be able to
make a resonable job of translating midi to score is, in my experience,
Sibelius. And even then, you often have to keep listening to the midi file
to edit the score into shape. (Finale tends to make a complete hash of
things when importing midi, as do apps like Cubase and Logic Audio in re:
of converting to score - e.g., passages in triple time or faster usually
end up as chords in double time!)

>doesn't contain the musical information.  MusicXML looks pretty
>promising.  The latest version of Finale can produce this and there are
>about 10 other programs that support it and the number is growing.  One
>of them is SharpEye which purports to be able to convert a scanned image
>into MIDI or MusicXML.  I haven't used these so I can't comment on their
>effectiveness.

Hmm, judging by my experiences with Neuratron Photoscore Pro/Sibelius,
musical OCR still has a pretty _long_ way to go, sadly. Manuscript is out
completely, and even a printed score usually needs so much editing that
I've often found it quicker to transcribe manually.


Richard


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