Coda Music Technology Finale 2000.(Evaluation)

Coda Music Technology, 6210 Bury Drive, Eden Prairie, Minnesota 55346-1718, USA; telephone (612) 937-9611; fax (612) 937-9760; finalesales@codamusic.com; World Wide Web www.codamusic.com

The past few years have seen an explosion of high end music notation software. Sibelius 1.0, Nightingale 3.0, and the latest version of Coda Music Technology's popular package, Finale 2000. Past upgrades to Finale usually focused on adding new tools to an already complex user interface. This led to charges that the program was bloated and too difficult to learn, particularly after Sibelius came out with its much simpler tool palette. With Finale 2000, Coda has simplified use through a new startup interface, user-friendly instructions, a reduction of tools, and more defaults, while adding features that give even more control to the advanced user.

The first change one notices when using Finale 2000 is the Setup Wizard (see Figure 1). Clearly inspired by the startup interface featured in Sibelius 1.0, the. Setup Wizard prompts the user for document name and composer, which are automatically placed in the Title and Composer text defaults, and then offers a list of instrumentation choices to pick from. Older versions of Finale came with a healthy set of templates to aid in formatting a score, but the list was still limited. Setup Wizard allows easy customization, automatically sets up any necessary transpositions, and provides enough prompts to comfort even the most timid user. The more experienced users can set the default startup for templates or the standard single staff, although I found the Setup Wizard to be very helpful for most projects.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Following the theme of making learning easier, Coda has included several Quicktime video tutorials and a Visual Index that is linked to the online documentation. These features require the CD-ROM and do not cover the more exotic user needs such as Schenkerian Analysis notation or extended 20th-century performance notation. However, the videos, based on the written tutorials packaged in previous Finale instruction manuals, do make learning more enjoyable and convenient for beginners, and this should reduce Finale's most negative feature, its intimidating size and scope.

One of the biggest changes in Finale 2000 is the reduction of the number of tool icons. Previous versions required three separate tools for inputting musical expressions: the Score Expression Tool, the Staff Expression Tool, and the Articulation Tool. The only difference between the first two tools was whether the expression was attached to a particular measure (Score Expression) or to a particular note (Staff Expression). The Articulation Tool also attached expressions to a particular note, but only used the articulation symbols. In Finale 2000 these three tools have been combined into one, the Expression Tool. When selecting the particular expression, radio buttons are used to indicate how the expression should be attached. The articulation graphics were added to the graphic expression library that already existed in previous Staff and Score Expression Tools. And, in the most convenient feature of all, every expression handle on the page is shown when the Expression Tool is selected, so the user doesn't have to remember if a particular expression is attached to the measure or the note.

The two real-time note entry tools from Finale '98, the Transcription Tool and the HyperScribe Tool, have been combined into one HyperScribe Tool. Transcription is now selected as an option in the HyperScribe menu. Hyperscribe still gives several choices for determining the beat, but the only one that works reliably is manual input of the beat using a specified MIDI key or pedal. The default setting, determining the beat by a metronomic tempo setting, is too sensitive, even with quantization set, and I could not get Hyperscribe to wait for my first note to begin recording. It either started before I was ready, or missed the first several notes. The sensitivity and quantization of the Transcription option has improved from previous Finale versions, but this option still has an ...