Igor

According to this:

http://www.noteheads.com/igor/Features/20th.html

Igor has a built-in ability to handle both quarter-tones and sixth-tones, which could mean it is an excellent program for 72-et music. Does anyone know about Igor?

--- In tuning@y..., "Gene Ward Smith" <genewardsmith@j...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_41175.html#41175

> According to this:
>
> http://www.noteheads.com/igor/Features/20th.html
>
> Igor has a built-in ability to handle both quarter-tones and sixth-
tones, which could mean it is an excellent program for 72-et music.
Does anyone know about Igor?

***Hi Gene,

Yes, this has been discussed on the Sibelius lists. It *does* do
these microtones which would make it potentially exciting (for *me*
anyway) but the consensus among people who've tried the program as
well as the professional engravers I know is that it is only of very
*average* quality in the overall when compared to Sibelius and Finale.

There is, I believe, a functional demo as well as demos for Sibelius
and Finale, so I suppose you could experiment if you'd like.

(I'm sticking with Sibelius for the time being... for one thing, I've
*learned it now... :)

J. Pehrson

Joseph Pehrson schrieb:

> ***Hi Gene,
> > Yes, this has been discussed on the Sibelius lists. It *does* do > these microtones which would make it potentially exciting (for *me* > anyway) but the consensus among people who've tried the program as > well as the professional engravers I know is that it is only of very > *average* quality in the overall when compared to Sibelius and Finale.

Not in my experience. I like its output much more than that of Sibelius or of this small scale Finale (think...) Allegro it is. It is just generally a young program, buggy like hell, and worst of all, it has changed owners and, presumably, politics, so it might not even try to become what it set out to be any more.

On my system, the micro-accidentals show at best a random behaviour. Upwards seems to have an effect, downwards doesn't.

As for ease of use: You can assign slurs, dynamics, articulations right along with note imput from the computer keyboard. (Changing them after the fact is a bit tricky, but can be done, and easier than in Allegro where apparently any note with more than three ledger lines wants to belong to the neighboring system if you want to grab it with the mouse and regularly does not follow clef changes (at least in transposing parts) when I try to get them closer).

klaus

Gene Ward Smith schrieb:
> According to this:
> > http://www.noteheads.com/igor/Features/20th.html
> > Igor has a built-in ability to handle both quarter-tones and sixth-tones, which could mean it is an excellent program for 72-et music. Does anyone know about Igor?

This is yet to come (hopefully). Yes, there are options in the transposition menu for sixth and quarter tones (up and down only, not in a continuos scale like the 12-et intervals). The graphical accidental pane only has the usual quarter tone symbols (accidentals with arrows), and the sixth tones look very much the same. No idea where they took them from: the arrows are flagged on one side only. Who's to see this? And there are no symbols for third tones.
Besides, you don't hear it. Igor has a pretty elaborate playback engine that makes 12-et scores actually sound GOOD - but your "microtones" will sound the same as the sharps and flats they are derived from.
It should also be possible to achieve vertical justness, theoretically. I haven't tried this, but it explicitly says in the documentation that string harmonics are played back at their true pitch "for greater realism". And if this works, you can twiddle all the instrument definitions to do the same (with a caveat: possibly the playback engine is intelligent enough to know which string you are using - Igor just adds a little circle to the note, whereas I would have liked the additional diamond-shaped note to make everything explicit).
Shortly before the inventor of the program, Peter Bengtson, took an "extended sick leave" in February, there was even talk of a meantone implementation. Nothing has come of that. The company now belongs to ... the guys from Abba and Roxette plus another one. In the past six months, they apparently prepared Abba and Roxette scores that you can download from their respective sites (looked for them today, didn't find them). A version 1.7 is said to be coming "soon" for half a year now, and as yet, nobody knows what it will do better. There are bugs in the lyrics engine, you can't repeat double bars, every once in a while Igor recommends you quit without saving (and that's an improvement to the former behaviour)... but in my opinion, it is the only program that lets you continue to think like a musician, that treats parts as living, well, parts of the score (you can edit wherever you like, it affects all of the piece), and the parts look fabulous without any tweaking, so as much as I also hate it, I do use it, but not for microtonal stuff. If it were possible to recommend Igor with a good conscience, then it would NOT be for 72-et because you don't see the differences in the accidentals. 24-et and any isolated inflections (Scelsi-like) will be fine.

How I wish this would help,
klaus

I tried the demo when it first came out and it was slower than
a dog and suffered from just about every user-interface problem
in the book. It appears to be a bad Mac OS 9 app badly ported
to other OS's. 'Shame, too, since they wrote it in LISP. :(

-Carl