Encore or Overture ???

[ericlecardinal]

Good evening to all
What do you think of this amazing news?
https://passportmusic.com
Encorture or Overcore ???

[Merv]

When you log onto the site suggested by ericlecardinal – passportmusic.com – make sure to click on the upper right hand banner that says ‘About Us’. You will find some amazing information there!

Better yet, here it is…

Sonic Scores, Inc. (previously known as Geniesoft, Inc. ), has been a music software company since the year 2000. On June 16, 2022, Sonic Scores purchased the Passport Music Software assets and trademarks. Sonic Scores plans to update Encore and Master Tracks Pro software to today’s standards while adding a few critically needed features. The purchase was made because of the many requests from customers who were unable to move forward with their years of work. Don Williams, the founder of Sonic Scores, was the original creator of Passport’s software products and was an early pioneer in the music software industry. He was the creator of Master Tracks Pro, Encore, Overture, and with Tracy Collins created Amadeus Symphonic Orchestra sample library. Below is a brief description of the history of his involvement with the Passport Music Software products.

Don’s first program, The Music Shop was written for the Commodore 64 computer and published by Broderbund Software in 1984. Later that year Passport Designs contacted Don and asked him to write a more advanced version, using MIDI, instead of the Commodore’s three internal voices. Now realize that MIDI was just one year old and Passport was one of the pioneers in this new technology. They were looking for products that would use MIDI. Shortly afterwards, Passport published The Music Shop for MIDI and then asked Don to write Master Tracks Pro. MTP was written on the Macintosh computer and was released in 1987. It was the first commercial music program to represent MIDI data graphically that could be edited with a mouse. This visionary approach won the Music Program of the Year Gold Record by Electronic Musician.

While taking a short break from programming, Don moved to Florida to coach some of the top junior tennis players in the world at Rick Macci tennis academy. During his off time he decided to write a program that displayed Master Tracks Pro data as notation. Don sent his alpha prototype to Dave Kusek at Passport Designs and the rest is history. Dave was euphoric and he convinced Don that this was going to be “the next big thing” in music software. Two years later in 1989, the program was released as Encore, which became a best seller, as it was one of the first notation programs to work on a Macintosh.

Several years later Opcode systems asked Don to write Overture as a compliment to their award winning sequencer, Vison. Overture was released in 1994, again winning several awards and was a best seller.

Don plans to keep Passport Music software running as a separate entity while reviving both Encore and Master Tracks Pro along with working on his other projects at Sonic Scores.

[PeteFine]

Yes, that is an impressive resume.

[olivnote]

That's an impressive resume! Undoubtedly!
But...does it address our concerns about the latest Overture update? I do not think so, no ?

[Bill Reed]

Why not just enable Overture to import old Encore scores?

[ericlecardinal]

It's a pity to have transformed the title of the subject, I find that "Encorture or Overcore" had the merit to expose well the paradox of this business!
Even if I am really delighted by this acquisition -as an old Encore user-, I don't really understand the interest for Don if he has to run the 2 competing softwares side by side? Unless he plans to merge them in the future!
Or if it is a way to allow Encore users to migrate their score stock to the modern world, and thus have the choice to switch smoothly to a new editor?

[Andre Baeck]

Hello,
I've been a long time MusicTime, then Encore user, and a betatester during a couple of years.
I did not use it much since a couple of years, since my musical tools activity has evolved to create choral training aids, including lyrics, and displaying the played score on the screen. This requires other software, and luckily I often find the new pîeces in convertible formats.
And so did not create anymore large scores which were intended for printing, for which Encore is much more suitable that that other software.

While, as a Windows user, I'm not affected by the lack of 64-bit support, but have been hardly disappointed by the lack of development of these products, from the time it suffered a Management Buy in 2013.
Mainly in 2020 and 2021, a lot of people have complained, without any answer, on the Passport forum.

I raised there some discussion about tools and methods to migrate the .enc files to formats allowed by other editing software (essentially MusicXML); also about a minimal "farewell upgrade" to enable conversion of the Encore files.
It turns out that these options raised little interest amonf the Encore forum participants. Perhaps more than preserving the scores they developped, they want to keep the Encore/MT products WITH their look and feel, and it's intuitiveness.

So, the announcement of an Encore 6 version by SonicScores and it's PassPort subsidiary is a real relief for them.

Having Overture "simply" reading Encore scores (which it did at some point in time) would be a relief only for the users ready to upgrade to other software. And it might be necessary to keep hands on the Encore market and customer base.

On a longer time base, it might not be cost-effective to keep to products. And I fully understand the disappointment and fear that the Overture development can get more delays. But we may hope that the business plan was made, and resources secured to allow these parallel developments.

As far as I know (but I need to experiment further), Overture and Encore have many genes in common, inherited from their common father. But perhaps not enough to merge.

It's not my last word here. I was informed of this purchase, while done one month ago, only last week.

[MikeHalloran]

The Encore/Mastertracks Pro Forums are open for discussions and feature requests.

https://passportmusic.com/forums/

For the time being, Overture and Encore will remain separate products. Since Overture cannot open Encore files, that's the way it must be for now.

Speaking for myself only, though I like Overture, the simpler design and layout of Encore suits the church and lead sheet work that is my bread and butter much better. It needs to simply work, have decent slurs and support MusicXML 3.0 to make me happy. With nice slurs and xml 3.0 already in Overture, I don't expect to be disappointed.

[Don]

Overture will be able to open Encore files once Encore 6 is released.

[clp560]

I've been trying the trial version of Overture and it's the closest music software to Encore so far, especially after I've tweaked the font to look more like my old tweaked Anastasia font in Encore 5. I suppose my question is since Overture is currently offering a good cross-grade price is it better to buy this rather than wait for the new Encore 6? My main need would be that all the many Encore files I have will open directly (i.e. not via musicxml) in Overture after the release of Encore 6 as suggested in the previous post. The export of xml from Encore 5 (Mac or PC) is very poor and it's easier - though time-consuming - to simply rescore the files!

It may be that the price of Encore 6 will be tempting in comparison but I like the potential extra features in Overture. Anyone here thinking along the same lines?

[Don]

Sorry, but there is no good solution, because Encore 6 is still a few months away.
It is up to you to decide on how to handle this until Encore 6 arrives.

[clp560]

Thanks for the replies.

Could you clarify that Overture will open Encore 5 files directly in the future without needing Encore 6 as the go-between, as it were? If not then I can wait for the new Encore 6 rather than buying both.

[Don]

Overture will open Encore 5,6 files in the future.

[commnthings]

Overture will open Encore 5,6 files in the future.

Don,

Hopefully you are already on this one. One 'feature' of Encore v 4.5 and later is that the file format changed so that older versions couldn't open the newer files but there is no easy way to recognize the change. In my opinion they should have changed the file extension ( e.g. .enc to .encx a la MS Office). That way the user could recognize the newer formatted files.

Can you do that for the new Encore 6.0?

Thanks, and Happy New Year!

[clp560]

Thanks to Don's replies on future updates allowing Overture to open older Encore 5 files, I decided to take advantage of the current crossgrade offer and buy Overture 5. The price is good (if you can find your old Encore serial!) and Encore 6 may well be a bit higher so it makes sense to have the extra features. Doesn't mean I might not be tempted into buying Encore 6 later...