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by ericdano

SmartMusic 10

June 4, 2007 in Reviews

MakeMusic, after much hype, delay, and then more hype, has finally released SmartMusic 10 in April. This is really what the program should have been from the get go. There are a lot of great Concert Band, and String Orchestra music on the screen selections. There are a few Jazz Band ones as well. The program is Universal Binary for Macintosh, meaning it is really responsive.

The short review of this is to get it. If you can get it for the $25 a year subscription price, it is a huge value. There are tons of great tunes, exercises, and other things in there.

However, the promised “60 New Titles A Month” has not materialized as of yet. And there are some bugs need to be addressed….

The New Stuff

In the previous version of SmartMusic a lot of the arrangements were installed when you installed the program. Now, SmartMusic downloads what it needs. For people with fast internet connections, that is great. For people on Dialup….you have my sympathies. Though, on the flip side, once you have them, you don’t need to download them again.

This is also true of the Pro Audio backgrounds. One of the new features of SmartMusic 10 is the inclusion of professional background recordings. So, instead of a midi rendition of a Jazz piece, you now get a great sounding real version of the song. But…..you need to download it. For dialup users…..well, that could be a time consuming thing. Once you download them, the recordings seem to be stored in a SQLlite database as MP3s. I’ve tried out a lot of the Concert band and Jazz Ensemble ones. Very nice. Recording quality is excellent. You can also select whatever part you want to play. So, you can play Oboe parts, or Clarinet 2, or Bass Clarinet, or Drums. Very cool and fun stuff.

Music on the screen. The previous version of SmartMusic had a very limited amount of music on the screen. There were a dozen or so classical pieces, the Alfred Jazz stuff, Wynton Jazz stuff, and the exercises. SmartMusic 10 has a ton of music on the screen. ALL the pro audio selections have music on the screen.

There are some things to track student assignments and stuff. I really am not interested in that, so, I did not try it.

The Bad Stuff

First, content. MakeMusic is promising Read the rest of this entry →

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by ericdano

SmartMusic 10 M.I.A.

March 25, 2007 in Articles

For months, MakeMusic has been saying SmartMusic 10 is coming. The amount of hype they have been making is akin to Microsoft and it’s “new” Vista operating system. MakeMusic hasn’t even updated the current version of SmartMusic to handle files generated by Finale 2007 which was released way back in August. To create files, you need to have 2006 still installed on your computer.

The other day, I received a packet from MakeMusic. I was shocked. It looked like SmartMusic 10 had been release. Alas, it was not. Instead of spending money getting the stupid program out, they chose to spend quite a bit of money to continue the “hype” of the vaporware SmartMusic 10. This packet probably cost $10 to put together. Perhaps more.

Let us examine the contents of this “hype” package….

First Read the rest of this entry →

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by ericdano

Finale 2007

November 30, 2006 in Reviews

MakeMusic released Finale 2007 a while ago. August I believe. I’ve been using it since then, and I think I can finally review it properly.

There are not a lot great new features in Finale 2007 compared to 2006. The big feature, in fact, really the only feature that is huge, is the linked parts. Though, on MakeMusic’s preview page they harp “features” such as “Authorization Improvements“, and “Improved pickups, vertical collision remover“. There are a couple of other new things I get to. Let’s dismiss the authorization thing. That is as lame as the Copyright symbol they billed as a feature in 2006. The vertical collision remover sorta works, but not really. I can’t really see any difference in the pickups as I really didn’t do much with complex pickup measure.

So, lets dive into the reasons why you’d want to upgrade to 2007…..

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by ericdano

Tweaking Smart Music On The Mac

September 16, 2006 in Articles

I have a love/hate relationship with MakeMusic’s Smartmusic. First, the love part. I love that it has a lot of backgrounds for classical etudes, and you can slow them down, tweak the key, etc. You can even record yourself with it, though the quality and the mixing of the resulting recording is not great at all.

Hate part. They tether you to the computer. Personally, I hate looking at a computer monitor all day, and for music. I like to have music stretched out on my stand. 3 Pages sometimes. A lot of stuff, including the jazz stuff in Smartmusic, is screen only. While I can understand copyright issues for songs, for simple little jazz patterns I don’t. Why not let people print them?

Anyhow, the Read the rest of this entry →

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by ericdano

State Of Digital Education

April 18, 2005 in Articles

I’ve been using Smart Music for a while. It’s good for hearing and practicing books it has backgrounds to, such as selections from the Hal Leonard library, and all those Voxman classical etudes. I don’t really use it with the microphone feature as it usually doesn’t work right (jumps, or gets lost). And honestly, the sounds are pretty lame. I wish MakeMusic would better the sounds, or open it up to allow the use of better sounds. Either way. Hopefully version 9 will have better microphone tracking and sounds.

SmartMusic is a good educational tool, but Digitalmusicnotebook looks like where the future is. This Windows only program (erg!) is geared towards keyboard and guitar players, but it takes the SmartMusic idea a step further. It includes access to the sheetmusic. If the content has no copyright issues, you can print it or whatever. If it needs to be bought, like say the a song off the Spiderman 2 soundtrack, you have to buy it (you can hear a limited version of the song). Not sure if they are actively updating the program (last version was June 2004), but the idea of an integrated program that you can see/hear/print/work on music is a step in the right direction.

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by ericdano

Finale 2004 PC

November 23, 2003 in Reviews

While I still am pissed about Coda Music blowing it on shipping out a OS X version of Finale on time, I finally broke down and upgraded my PC version for a couple of the new features it offers and that I need. I also found a couple of interesting new little things in the program as well….First off, there is a lot of stuff that I don’t need nor wanted in the new Finale 2004. Human playback, Soundfonts, and Save as Audio are the main ones. Yes, its nice to know that people without a midi rig can hear things better. And that they can save things to burn to CD. Good for them. The hard core Finale users, like myself, need things that make our lives easier.

Coda changed the Simple Note Entry a little. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I used that. A new expression interface is, however, something long over due. This really now fixes a lot of the annoying little “glitches” one encounters while scoring out one’s music. Namely, the damn text/dynamics being in strange places. Is this alone with the update price? No, but it is getting there.

FinaleScript sounds interesting, but who has time to muck with that? Drum Grooves is a welcome addition, but the notation is still a little strange. And you can not get the Drum Groove to do time changes. No big deal I guess. Smart Page Turns looks good. I haven’t gotten to the point yet to try it, but it looks like it could help. It would be nice to see this in the EXTRACT PARTS area rather than where it is (PLUGINS->New Plugins for Finale 2004->Smart Page Turns). Maybe if I learned FinaleScript I could have something automatically run it? Um…….NO. Coda! Put the option in EXTRACT PARTS, just like Music Space is. Geeze. Hello.

Smart Cue Notes is a welcome addition, though I am so use to using TGTools one that I might continue using that one.

For those who use another sequencer and load the final project into Finale for Printing (like I do), you’ll be sad to know that Midi importing still sucks. One thing I found that it has now is this great little Plug-in, Auto Dynamics placement. It goes through a measure or measures, and based on the Midi volumes, puts in dynamics. Now that is a very welcome feature. However, since Midi imports still suck, it will save me a little time, but not a lot.

Verdict? On my lowly 600Mhz Pentium III, Finale 2004 seems a tad zipper. There are just a few things worth upgrading to. Is it worth the price? For the PC version, not really. The expression interface is the main reason, and if you have TGTools you probably don’t need Finale 2004. For Mac users, when/if they ship a OS X version, then it would be worth it and more. But for PC users, if you have Finale 2003 and TGTools, stay there. Unless you need some of the new things.

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by ericdano

Finale 2004

August 6, 2003 in Reviews

Finally, Codamusic is coming out with an update to Finale. The most notable feature to me is the OS X support. Its interesting that Coda decided to Carbonize Finale 2004 so it runs under OS X and OS 9.

Other features that sound interesting are: Finale Script, New simple entry, Drum grooves, Pitch to midi converter that works?, Smart page turns (finally!), and Edits. One feature, the ability to make a sound file out of a Finale File seems to me, well, something I wouldn’t use. I have a midi rig, and is this sound file going to sound as good as my tone modules? I don’t think so. Band in a Box has something like this as well.

In all, a good sounding update. $89. The same cost as the last update. The OS X version isn’t going to be released until October though. PC Version in August.

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