Nicholas wrote:
Let's talk about fingering.
You want manual fingering. Cairnz wants some sort of fingering import.
What will it take to get it crossed off the list?
My main assertion is still that unless you're manually entering from some other piece of reference material (e.g., a book or something), the person that wants the fingerings the most is in the weakest position to provide them by themselves. So to me, manual entry is of fairly limited value.
Not necessarily. If people ask for fingering help on the forums, they're going to need a way to input those fingerings. If fingerings were downloadable online and sent to Synthesia, people would need a way of editing them to fit their own hands and finger shapes. What's good for the goose may not be good for the gander.
In my experience, algorithms are always a bit ropey, because they simply cannot take into account all possible combinations. The more variables you provide to tweak the output, the more complex the algorithm becomes, and the less useful it becomes for the casual user.
I have tried Midi Illustrator's fingering algorithm (bought the program mainly for it, as well as the notation capabilities to practice proper sight reading) and it's underwhelming. The best way to use it is still to work out some of the fingering yourself before getting it to generate the rest. But then again, if you do that, chances are that the rest of your fingers will already be in the right places to hit the notes you don't need to put fingering down for, making the algorithm pretty useless. Even if you do leave it to automatically generate everything, you will still need to go back and edit anyway, which would take you the almost the same amount of time as figuring out all of the fingering by yourself. Blindly taking any given fingering as gospel is a dangerous thing, because it can handicap you and possibly cause physical injury. You must always be prepared to tweak things to suit your own purposes. Anyway, I digressed from the subject a little, so to get back on track...
If you leave the algorithm to figure out fingerings by itself, the quality is largely dependent on the length of the passage you are trying to get fingering for. Longer passages can be incredibly weird-looking. Feeding it chunks of two bars is alright, depending on the material, but give it eight bars (of anything) and it falls to pieces unless you help it out. Leaps are also hit-and-miss (mostly miss unless helped).
My piano teacher says that everyone should eventually be able to write their own fingerings for a passage, based on what they personally can accomplish, and what they feel comfortable with - but this obviously goes hand-in-hand with music theory knowledge (knowledge of scale/arpeggio fingering etc.). Nobody can put down better fingerings for you than yourself, after all.
Given my experience with Midi Illustrator, I would never use an automatic fingering generator on its own, and my reasoning is that if I need to give it help, I might as well do the whole thing myself. Manual fingering all the way for me - but I'm experienced enough to use it, and would be greatly disappointed if this weren't an option for the more advanced users. Algorithms have benefit to those without the requisite theory to understand why certain fingerings work for certain passages, but they do have their limitations. The more advanced you are, the more frustrating and unworkable the quirks of the algorithm become.
