Spot on, Bruce. QuickScribe is quite useful for what it does. For large orchestral scores, it's wonderful for quick editing non-adjacent tracks. I'd never use it for the kinds of professional window dressing (articulations, phrase markings, custom noteheads, etc) that a dedicated notation program would naturally do so much better. Notation and virtual orchestral sequencing are really two very different things. I look at DP's QS as a more *musical* representation of the MIDI-Editor. It's just easier at times to read notes rather than edit bars.
Aside from QuickScribe, there is the Notation Editor-- another tool for managing data, but not one intended at all for printing. Both have served me well in speeding up the process.
QT is working well, from what I hear. I use it in DP 4.61 and have never had an issue with it.
Tom: DP doesn't have an offline MIDI-to-audio rendering for virtual instruments. That's one of Logic's best features, imho. In DP, you have to bus and record your MIDI data via VI playthrough in real time. The resulting audio is then bounced to disk offline. But, having used both DP and Logic, it's a small sacrifice for me. By the time I get to the bounce phase of a project, it's really no big deal because I've saved so much time during the sequencing and mixing phases. One thing I do is to set my start and stop counters, hit record, and then let DP do its thing. I don't have to sit there and watch it. Now, in the event something just goes terribly wrong (which during VI rendering for me has been "never"-- knock wood), the mixes are ready for edge editing. This is all done in the Sequence Editor, which is the Editor you want to use.
One click/drag at the beginning of the track plus a keystroke, and my silent fade is in place. A slight drag of the fade handle and that's all done. Same for the end of the track. If necessary, I'll draw in some additional volume curves for good measure, but the subsequent bounce takes place offline. Often, I just start subsequent mixes, then it's out for a drive to check them all out in the car stereo.
It must be said, however, that one must understand what parts of OSX play nice with DP and which parts don't. iSight has been known to interfere with audio, and Widgets often get in the way, for example (but this may be true for Logic as well). Knowing about how to set your preferences for the best hardware performance is also not to be taken lightly. Many people work with DP with most of its crucial default settings still in place and then wonder why it doesn't function as they wish. But again, this is true of any DAW. Running background processing all the time, prefilling buffers, sustaining triple-digit Undo Histories can all take their toll depending on what demands one places on his system.
The nice thing is that DP is a bit easier to navigate that Logic can be at times. It feels less cluttered without feeling less featured, to me, anyway.
If you are likely to have both DP and Logic together, you can take advantage of the mixing and mastering features of either or both, especially once your project is totally rendered in multi-track audio. If you find that you need to make an adjustment to some MIDI element in the viola part, you just open the VI-MIDI project, make the adjustment, re-render the track and swap out the former for the latter.
I must do it this way because I only have one computer at the moment. My G5 works much better working with audio without VI's loaded-- and I find that I have more CPU and RAM resources available to load in more Altiverbs and other processors. Once I get a proper network going, all of my mixing will stay in real time MIDI until the last possible moment.
There is more than one way to do it, and few approaches are totally wrong as long as they work for the user.
Just another 3¢ worth...
Aside from QuickScribe, there is the Notation Editor-- another tool for managing data, but not one intended at all for printing. Both have served me well in speeding up the process.
QT is working well, from what I hear. I use it in DP 4.61 and have never had an issue with it.
Tom: DP doesn't have an offline MIDI-to-audio rendering for virtual instruments. That's one of Logic's best features, imho. In DP, you have to bus and record your MIDI data via VI playthrough in real time. The resulting audio is then bounced to disk offline. But, having used both DP and Logic, it's a small sacrifice for me. By the time I get to the bounce phase of a project, it's really no big deal because I've saved so much time during the sequencing and mixing phases. One thing I do is to set my start and stop counters, hit record, and then let DP do its thing. I don't have to sit there and watch it. Now, in the event something just goes terribly wrong (which during VI rendering for me has been "never"-- knock wood), the mixes are ready for edge editing. This is all done in the Sequence Editor, which is the Editor you want to use.
One click/drag at the beginning of the track plus a keystroke, and my silent fade is in place. A slight drag of the fade handle and that's all done. Same for the end of the track. If necessary, I'll draw in some additional volume curves for good measure, but the subsequent bounce takes place offline. Often, I just start subsequent mixes, then it's out for a drive to check them all out in the car stereo.
It must be said, however, that one must understand what parts of OSX play nice with DP and which parts don't. iSight has been known to interfere with audio, and Widgets often get in the way, for example (but this may be true for Logic as well). Knowing about how to set your preferences for the best hardware performance is also not to be taken lightly. Many people work with DP with most of its crucial default settings still in place and then wonder why it doesn't function as they wish. But again, this is true of any DAW. Running background processing all the time, prefilling buffers, sustaining triple-digit Undo Histories can all take their toll depending on what demands one places on his system.
The nice thing is that DP is a bit easier to navigate that Logic can be at times. It feels less cluttered without feeling less featured, to me, anyway.
If you are likely to have both DP and Logic together, you can take advantage of the mixing and mastering features of either or both, especially once your project is totally rendered in multi-track audio. If you find that you need to make an adjustment to some MIDI element in the viola part, you just open the VI-MIDI project, make the adjustment, re-render the track and swap out the former for the latter.
I must do it this way because I only have one computer at the moment. My G5 works much better working with audio without VI's loaded-- and I find that I have more CPU and RAM resources available to load in more Altiverbs and other processors. Once I get a proper network going, all of my mixing will stay in real time MIDI until the last possible moment.
There is more than one way to do it, and few approaches are totally wrong as long as they work for the user.
Just another 3¢ worth...