I enjoy listening to wind bands - it carries me back to old Virginny and all the ensembles I used to play in. Tallahassee Winds put on a good concert last night. This revealed that the programmer probably based all his future enhancements on some shoddy baseline and didn't want to stop cashing his royalty checks to ensure its soundness. The company (which was probably one guy) kept putting out new versions for hundreds of dollars (the current price is $600 I believe) but this one little bug never got fixed. I worked with that software over the course of three versions, and every one of them would fatally crash if you moved a particular rank formation across a yard line in a certain way. Back in my drill-writing phase, the de facto drill software was Pyware and then Pyware 3D. Enjoy learning languages for free playing with the music videos and filling in the lyrics of your favorite songs: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian. Then you have the cases of software that gets away with being buggy simply because it's the only game in town. Wouldn't it have been more intuitive to have a dialog box which said " Crescendo from 50 (pp) to 120 (ff) steadily over 8 beats"? Then you could have drop-down boxes to change the underlined parts. Finally you have to match that shape to the MIDI controller responsible for Volume (that's controller 7, geek-y). If you want to crescendo a particular amount, you have to create a graphical shape that matches the contour of the crescendo magnitude and then fit it to the occasion by inputting a numeric ratio for time scale and level scale. Consider, for example, Finale's shape editing tool. I've never understood why programmers don't apply the same simple strictures of human-computer interaction that are used with normal software. If you're ever a full professor somewhere, check back on that idea - maybe I'll give you a discount if I like you. I'm almost inspired enough to add "write ear training software" to my long list of future activities. We used MacGamut when I was an undergrad, and while it may not be as customizable as PM, I'd recommend it any day over this tripe. ![]() Even on the instructors' end, the class report scheme (coupled with a Quit menu option than seems to mean different things at different times) makes more work than it should. PM's interface actually interferes with the learning process and more often than not it prevents students from translating what they want to answer into an expected canned response. In general, it seems that software designed by or for musicians tends to be unintuitive or slipshod (consider early versions of Finale), but here it's especially unacceptable since the program is billed as educational software. Practica Musica is easily the most poorly-designed software I've ever used.
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