Klarinet Archive - Posting 000010.txt from 1994/10

From: Billie Winter <BKWINTER@-----.BITNET>
Subj: Music Software
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 1994 10:55:52 -0400

I apologize for straying away from the current discussion of music notation
software into the sequencing realm, but I thought others might be interested
in a recent experience of mine. I am the proud owner of a MIDI keyboard and
a shiny new Power Macintosh (along with a Buffet clarinet, of course), and I
decided to try out music sequencing, mostly as a means of inputting and
editing piano accompaniments for my clarinet practice sessions. On the advice
of a local music store's electronic music expert, I purchased Stienberg-Jones'
Cubase-Lite as an "introductory" sequencing package, which also contains some
notation and printing capabilities. What a disaster it has been! Apparently,
there are a whole host of features that will not work with a Power Mac, includ-
ing the all-important metronome. The documentation is absolutely abominable,
and technical support, while friendly, has proved to be remarkably unable to
suggest any solutions to the problems. In fact, they recently sent me an
update to the program, which reportedly fixes some troublesome bugs, but which
in reality fixed the score editing mode such that I can no longer open it on
my Mac. Of course, neither the store where I purchased it, nor the company has
a money-back guarantee, so I am seemingly stuck with a virtually unusable
product.
One of the reasons I'm sharing this is that someone else mentioned a
Cubase product in the notation discussion. I would certainly have to warn
against purchasing any Steinberg-Jones product unless you have tested the
program on your particular system, and found it to meet your needs. I think
many of the problems stem from the fact that the bulk of the company is in
Germany, with only sales and a very little technical support available in the
US - not a criticism of German companies, of course; it's just harder to do
business and communicate with foreign companies.
Hopefully this information will be useful to other readers of the list.