Re: Joy of Klez--unsolicited praise (creeping off topic)

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

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On 14/01/2003 at 22:00 Richard Schoeller wrote:

>We are kind of wandering off topic, but it may be useful to explore some
>of the issues are around such software.

Indeed.

>First off, I agree that programs like Sibelius and Finale are the
>current powerhouse applications.  You are not going to find applications
>that combine widespread use and capability like these two.

Indeed. Not that that necessarily means others may not be as suitable in
actual use, just that industry standards such as these are often impossible
to get away from. I.e., e.g., if you're working with/dealing with (or
hoping to) e.g. music publishers, they'll rarely even consider looking at
anything other than sibelius and, just about, Finale. Take the analogue of
the graphics field (where "industry standards" have been established for
very much longer already), specifically bitmap graphics say - there are a
myriad of often perfectly good graphics apps around, and there are some
that are very definitely actually far superior in power and facilities than
the industry standard, Photoshop (e.g., TIFFany on MacOS X - _the_ most
powerful app around short of switching to a Silicon Graphics box). Alas,
though, if you are a graphics pro working with/for things like ad agencies,
pre-press outfits or other trade "consumers" of graphics, woe betide you if
you're not able to submit the work in Photoshop format, or if you actually
have people looking at your stuff on your box and they don't see Photoshop
running! It's plain silly, IMO, there's little real point to it (other than
format standardisation), but there's nothing anybody can really do about
it, industry standards are de facto ones and no matter how much one objects
there's simply no getting away from them.

>There are two problems with relying on this.  First, and most immediate
>from my point of view, is that while anyone can get these applications,
>not everyone can easily run them.  Neither Finale nor Sibelius is
>currently available for outside of Windows or Mac.  Linux is not
>supported.  Nor do the vendors plan to support it.  If Linux is not
>supported, you can forget about more esoteric platforms.

I have no intention of getting into any sort of " OS advocacy" or flaming
or whatever here, but merely state the cold, bare facts. So...

So what? 95+per cent of the world's desktop machines today run either (some
version of) Windows or more rarely (some version of) MacOS. Other
platforms, even Linux, in this context might just as well not exist at all,
they're totally irrelevant as far as both commercial interests/"market
forces" and the average computer user are concerned. In fact (whilst I'm no
kind of Microsoft or Windows advocate) one could argue that such de-facto,
even brute force, "standardisation" is a _good thing_ for the user, among
other considerations not least in terms of prices. Could you imagine the
price of either Finale or Sibelius if the developers had to develop,
maintain and update versions for half a dozen different platforms?
(Actually, it wouldn't even be feasible if you had a situation where four
operating system had a roughly equal market share, esp. not for small
independent developers like Sibelius.)

Now if somebody chooses to run a minority OS without widespread support let
alone widespread commercial support, that is their choice and priviledge,
fine, but they then have IMO no cause for complaint of lack of support.
They also should be asking themselves in the first place, if this other
platform is actually viable for the kind of work they do (assuming it is
for professional or semi-pro use, rather than as a [computer] hobby). But
there's absolutely no cause for then complaining that certain apps and/or
file formats are just not available on this platform. Live with it, or move
on.

(Until recently, I was still running OPENSTEP for certain things myself,
and over the years I've pretty much used every desktop (and a few other) OS
that's ever been around, at various times.)

>Second, does anyone remember Lotus 1-2-3 (or older still Visicalc)? 

Yes, or 1-2-3's far superior predecessor, Lotus Improv, which was still
available on NeXT/OPENSTEP until a few years ago.. But those were very
different times. Windows was _barely_ useable at all then, let alone
ubiquitous, there were a fair number of different hardware as well as
software platforms around, and prices were generally sky high.

>Market dominance can be a fleeting thing.  To be too tied to proprietary
>formats can be a serious problem in the long run.  One of the things

Has never been a problem in the graphics field yet, and I'd rate the
chances of this happening in the audio/music/notation area just as remote.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but I consider the chance of it
happening small enough.

>that an end user should keep in mind is whether they will be able to go
>back to work that they did a few years ago and still do something with

All the more reason to stick with de facto industry standards. Even if the
dominant vendor and his format were ever to go down the plug hole, there'd
always be bound to be some facility to convert your work to the new format.
(This has actually happened in the past with certain CAD-related formats.)

>Sometimes there is no standardized format.  Look at the ubiquitous
>Microsoft DOC format.  The best that application vendors can hope to do
>with such a format is import and export the format.  There is no legal
>or technical reason that applications can't contain converters to and
>from Finale format.  Finale has control over their implementation, but
>can not prevent others from reverse engineering the file format.  This

The effort involved in and legal proof required for this make it a totally
unviable proposition commercially, far simpler and cheaper to pay the
(often, though by no means always, fairly reasonable) licence fee.

>In the case of LilyPond, the lack of interest in writing to Finale or
>Sibelius on the part of the author is certainly annoying.  It is the
>common problem of open-source software; the developers work on what
>interests them.  But the price is right 8^) and the author's response is
>always "if it interests you, write it!"

And they usually cannot afford to pay the licence fee, nor the legal and
related costs involved in proving "clean-room" reverse-engineering.

>BTW, I also agree with the notion that most OCR for music is pretty
>poor.  However, it is getting much better.  There was a time when OCR
>for printed text was really bad.  Now it is reliable enough that
>companies routinely use it to get data from forms into databases.  Maybe
>music OCR will reach that point too.  In any case, I just used it as an
>example.

I agree, it is bound to get just as good as text OCR is today, and I'm sure
quickly.

>I think I let this ramble far too long.

_This_ one most certainly has got far too long! Apologies in advance but I
thought the points of sufficient general interest to users of music
software.


Richard


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