On Friday 13 Jun 2003 9:40 pm, Chris Cannam wrote: > I wouldn't mind seeing a reply from > one of the NoteEdit developers, as I've probably inadvertantly > slandered them somewhere. Actually, reading it through again, I realise the opposite may be true: I probably haven't done much of a job of explaining why anyone would prefer to use Rosegarden. What a great salesman I am. Not that it makes any difference, since they're both free. The principle about Rosegarden is that all of the non-notation stuff is actually useful when working on notation as well, particularly if you're doing composition rather than just transcribing scores. For example, it does a good job of helping prepare reasonable MIDI performances: it can estimate things like velocities from the score, and can remember the performed times and durations of notes even while tidying them up for score purposes. It includes a quantizer dedicated to producing readable score, that admittedly still needs work but still does pretty much as good a job from performance timings as (say) Sibelius does (although Rosegarden really needs tempo-tracking as well -- it's on my to-do list). You can use it (with a soft synth or external synth and mixer) to render your compositions down to audio tracks. It has configurable program/bank patch maps for MIDI devices, including a number of popular devices as standard. Flashy stuff like antialiasing for notes isn't just for show, it makes it much easier to see and follow scores in smaller sizes; and having a nice friendly GUI is also a genuinely useful thing. There are also several areas where it has interesting potential rather than immediate utility, but they maybe aren't of much interest here. And there are some real downsides (here I go again with my non-salesman stuff). It sometimes behaves inconsistently or unexpectedly for reasons connected to the fact that it's manipulating sequenceable data behind the scenes -- i.e. things like tuplets and grace notes are stored in playable form rather than displayable form, and it takes some testing to get all the potential conversion cases working correctly. Many of the natty features described above are incomplete: for example the notation quantizer can guess slurs, tenuto etc but it tends to do so in rather inappropriate places at the moment. The lyric editor is weaker than NoteEdit's (forgot to mention that last time). And of course perhaps what you want is an editor you can enter whatever you like into, and that will do whatever you tell it with it, instead of an editor that thinks it knows what you're doing. And the Rosegarden developers talk too damn much. Chris
