Hi Marc, > I tried LP several years ago and quickly gave up. I decided to try it again > because I was frustrated with all of the manual adjustments my Finale scores > require, and wanted to see if LP could do better.
I used Finale from v1 [!!] in 1988 to Finale 2000. I gave up at that point — too many frustrations!! — and started looking for an alternative. > The price you pay is that an LP score is considerably more time-consuming to > enter. Although I expect to get better at it over time, I don’t think that > disadvantage can ever go away entirely. With Frescobaldi — especially the MIDI keyboard input — I believe I can now enter music faster than I ever could in Finale (and I was *very* fast). If the music doesn’t repeat at all, I’d say I am 5%-10% faster than I was at my Finale peak; when I can reuse material (which is VERY often, in the types of music I engrave), that percentage goes up. Of course, the real savings comes (as you imply) once the data is in: my tweaking time is ~5% TOTAL of what I used to put in with Finale (and what I still see my colleagues and friends putting in with Fin/Sib/etc., though Dorico is much better). > I am typesetting an opera score, which is clearly not the easiest place to > start—but that is what I do. I am guessing that whoever designed LP was not > thinking of orchestral scores Agreed. As a composer of operas, musicals, orchestra pieces, and other large-forces works, I feel your pain! =) > some things that ought to be easy (the “MarkLine” concept) are in fact quite > difficult. These are the kinds of things I believe we could improve upon more easily and quickly (or at least with more obvious incentive?!) if the user base was larger. And — like it or not — a real critical mass like that will require a GUI. Cheers, Kieren. ________________________________ Kieren MacMillan, composer (he/him/his) ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info ‣ email: kie...@kierenmacmillan.info
