Tokkemon

Quite, MakeMusic, Peaskware, and Alfred have all had a complex relationship.

To be clear, the company MakeMusic is not going out of business. They still are running their incredibly popular Make Music Cloud web-based app, used heavily in education (formerly called "Smart Music"). This was just an attempt to jettison a dinosaur in their portfolio. They haven't done any active development of Finale in many years.

The format is just so underpowered for what music notation requires, unfortunately. Michael Good pulled off a miracle writing the standard, but it doesn't do enough and now we have to deal with those shortcomings by fixing thousands of files that were perfectly fine.

You may not understand the scale here. There are about a hundred thousand users, a lot of whom had thousands of scores in this format. Some tens of thousands. It's not a straightforward proposition to simply jump to another platform, especially since there's no perfect conversion between any notation software given the proprietary algorithms involved, and the sheer complexity of music notation itself. It's a bad day for a lot of people.

So this is a rather niche industry concern but it's been wildly disruptive to anyone dealing with sheet music in practically any capacity. I run the Music Engraving Tips group on Facebook and I wrote a little essay given the situation, maybe some can get value from it.

Full disclosure, I'm the Senior Product Designer for Sibelius, so I'm uniquely embedded in this stuff this week.

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RIP Finale

This is a very sad week for our industry, a titan has fallen. The only other parallel I can think of is when the Sibelius London office closed in 2012. But this feels so much more tangible given the short timescale of the shutoff. Finale will no longer activate within one year, effectively locking people out of their scores.

To all the thousands of users out there who's entire catalogs of scores have now been put in jeopardy, I greatly empathize. I felt similarly back in 2012 when Sibelius looked like it was going away. Back then, Finale was the only viable alternative, though I didn't jump ship at the time. Fortunately, today there's a wealth of options and competition in our industry is strong.

Since this is such a monumental event in the music notation space, the mods and I are going to relax our restrictions on notation software how-to posts (Rule 2) so folks can discuss how to deal with their files, via MusicXML or otherwise. Please keep the conversations civil, I know tensions are high. We will monitor things closely and won't tolerate any animosity toward one platform or another, nor gloating or other unprofessional behavior. (Rule 3)

Back when I was literally 5 years old, I did my first arrangement in Finale. It opened up a new world to me, the world of the written note. Music notation has been my passion forever as a result. No matter which platform you use, remember the joy that music can bring and how these tools enable it. They are essential, and to lose one means a great deal.

It's just that there's thousands of Finale users who were caught by surprise here, and they are up in arms.

I work for one of their competitors, Sibelius, so I have to be on top of it.

Busy day in this niche industry!

It's the worst system, except for all the others.

Alex has us covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCTWyNstpD0&t=55s

I've seen this Doll House in person recently, it's on display at Windsor Castle. While it's extremely weird that it exists at all, if you get past that, it's an exceptional example of art and craft. So much incredible detail. It's unfortunate that it's behind glass and you can't really spend good time with it, because I could imagine being in there for hours and still not seeing all the nuances.

I suppose it's the same reason I love Miniland at Legoland. Huge miniature worlds so meticulously crafted. It boggles the mind.

lol on every point.

No, it does not. The subway is practically always faster.

"The better MTA's service is - more passengers and more Fare revenue they receive. This is how a normal healthy transportation agency would finance their capital investments."

[citation needed]

That may be how it works in a consumer product, but not how it works in transit.

The Day After is a light comedy compared to Threads.

They make a model of this exact thing: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/planet-earth-and-moon-in-...

Bets on how some executive saw their kid really into the hydraulic press channels and said, "We gotta get in on this! Here's piles of money."

Real hard-hitting, groundbreaking news on HN.

Debt also allows you to live when you can't find means otherwise.

I love Alec's work on the CED. So good and really nicely narrative-driven, which is kinda rare in this "let's review old technology" genre.

Sort of, there's a lot more editorial that goes into it than only typesetting.

Sure. It's an old-fashioned term for the artisans who engraved music notation onto metal plates. These were then inked for pressing. It's a highly specialized skill and requires a deep knowledge of now notation works and how musicians will respond to it. Today it is all done on computer but the artistry of knowing how the notation should look and the meaning behind it is still there. That's the basics but the work we do is quite varied and complicated.

It happens that I work for Avid as a designer for Sibelius, the leading music notation program in the world. I also run the Music Engraving Tips Facebook group if you're interested in learning more.

Yes we do, but it's not nearly enough to cover every major town and county. Stupid flaws in the system like the Selkirk hurdle should be systemically removed.

They can be rendered at any size.

But this solution won't even get you that far, let's be honest.

It's a nifty solution. But speaking as a music engraver, it could use a lot of improvement, and I don't think there's enough tolerance in CSS to make it work. The beams, slurs, and ties, in particular have real problems visually. This is why other methods of getting notation into the browser don't use such tools. You need pinpoint precision for vector rendering, which is why almost all browser notation is done with SVG or some sort of Canvas drawing.

Other than the clever solution of using CSS, why would you do this? One can already do scalable notation in the browser with other tools (Check out Adrian Holovaty's Soundslice or Sibelius Cloud Publishing).

Build more freight rail instead.

This is super cool and it's great! I enjoyed my brief try in the browser.

Couple feedback points: I really hate the health system. I wish it was clearer how much health the potion recovered. I'd almost have it more like a traditional unit-like health bar and the potions recover one unit. Also having the R key so close to the movement keys made me press it in a panic several times when trying to move away. ALso allowing you to use a potion when your health is full feels really cheap. Also what about purchasing such items in the store after each level?

I never really got used to the strict 90 degrees movement and my fingers constantly got confused between strafe and turn. But I'm sure I'd get used to it in time. I'm more used to the FPS movement when this is more of an arcade-style setup.

For the map, I'd recommend holding the TAB key to show it, so it's just for quick glances.

Would have appreciated a little more variety in the props, though I only played to level 8, so I'm sure more gets introduced. There were new enemy types all the time which was nice.

Stick with Consider This and the NPR News. NPR Politics Podcast is great too. I tend to avoid the opinion stuff since, yes, it's definitely got an overly-lefty outrage-bait angle.

This is a great use case for the Ryan Reynolds "But, why?" meme.

It probably won't take long to cut a hole in the wreckage to at least get one sea lane open so the port can still operate. A bunch of folks with metal cutting torches on a few dozen boats and a floating crane?

Yes it's a coincidence.