The following represents my opinion regarding the hype surrounding Igor. Food for thought, if you will...I would never go through what one has to go through for Finale, which is evident just by the length of the issue lists here. Sibelius, by the way, will not let you write a (always depised this coinage) tuplet over 9, and try the layers and see what happens. See if it comes out the way you would write the thing by hand...nopenopenopenope. Then, in the end, ask yourself if you are in fact composing to your inner ear, or to the soundboard. Midi cannot assimilate musical thought and I would further ask if it is really a good thing to become creatively dependant on an app. Now, just to go ahead and make the controversial statement of the night, I'll even say that MIDI, in and of itself, has made pseudo musicians out of people with no actual ability, in many cases, and the overgluttoning of music thanks to loop editors, sequencers and the like has all but destroyed music because everybody and their brother has a CD out, however inconsequential such substance contains. And, these thoughts are not intended to offend, but to evoke thought.Lastly, before the cut n paste. I have serious doubts that Stravinsky, or any composer od stature would have given up hand manuscripts for any notation program whatsoever, and they would never have depended on MIDI to represent their work. They heard it through their own piano realizations, but mostly, they heard it inside themselves. Henceforth......(to the Noteheads(Igor)Site
I have been watching this site for some time, and reading in numerous composer user groups an exceptional amount of (I'm sorry) hype concerning Igor. My personal opinion is after reading of exceptional problems with both Finale and Sibelius that any notation app is going to be difficult when trying to do certain things, and that it will be the proverbial day when an app such as this does not generate a user support question list 10 miles long. The bane of technology, if you will.
I have significant doubts based on two issues, #1 being the shroud of mystery surrounding doing the thing for Windows. My doubts are based on the distrust of converting a mac based app to a Windows environment, and if such were easy, I daresay, in Igor's case, it would be done by now. The whole thing reminds me of "The Beatnik Editor" which was "coming soon" for Windows, three years ago, and they, (being Headspace) never did succeed at converting it. I don't mean to imply that such will be the case in Igor, but one must admit that the whole of this process concerning this app has been indefinitive at best.
Most objectionable is the statement that we can even format our hard drive and not lose the installation. Well, if I were to buy an app, and a pricy app at that, one had best believe that I would insist on being able to F Disc my whole pc and re-install the product as many times as I wished, without restrictive software environments. The permise stated by the company on this is simply unacceptable. Maybe some would buy software such as this, but I assure you, users are quite sick of proprietary locks on their own software. I would reject the product outright, for that very issue alone.
I realize that every manufacturer feels their product is the best, but, there is a definite elitism in the air here and I daresay, it is an elitism without the goods thus far.
Additionally, the touted playback whatcha see ees whatcha get, upon inspection of the user manual, one will find that playback is dependant on "third party" software that convieniently is not supported by Noteheads.
What fun!
