Hello Gary,
I'm pleased that Notation Composer has made a sort of love at first sight impression with you. I believe you will find that Notation Composer also has depth of character below its initial friendly greeting to you.
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1. Using Garritan Personal Orchestra I can have up to eight instances of the player with eight instruments each, so I have several instruments using the same channel number, but on different instances. But when I assign, for example, flutes to "GPO Studio 1: channel 1" and violas to "GPO Studio 2: channel 1" there's a message in the flutes dialog, next to "channel", that says "shared with violas". But it's NOT shared, because it's on a different device.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>That you're using GPO shows that you care a lot about the sound, as well as the notation. Many Notation Composer users enjoy the sound of GPO.
The problem you described was fixed in version 2.1. Notation Composer now reports that the same channel is assigned to multiple tracks (staves) only in the case that they are assigned to the same MIDI device. If you're using Notation Composer version 2.2, you shouldn't see this problem.
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I'd rather have the option of seeing the score as one long horizontally scrolling document view... [second post] The functionality is great overall, but it really is bothersome to have the score paged when I'm editing performance dynamics.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>This is a fairly popular request. The priority of a Horizontal Scroll View is becoming fairly high for a future release of Notation Composer.
In the mean time, try out some of the ideas that MG suggested in his reply in this thread.
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3. It would be nice to be able to drag and drop the little green arrow at the top of the score to select a place to begin playing. Is the3re a way to position this? <!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>An easy way to place the green arrow is P+Click, which means holding down the 'P' key as you click the mouse. Although that requires two hands, typically P+Click would be a much faster way to move the green arrow than to drag it with the mouse, especially in the case where you want to move it to another page.
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4. When composing a new piece from scratch I have no idea how many measures it will have. Is this really necessary when creating a new score?<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>If you do not know how many measures your piece will be, just accept the default of 16 measures. You can easily add or delete measures later. Also, if you record from a MIDI keyboard, Notation Composer will automatically add more measures as you record.
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The other problem I'm having is more mysterious. This may be a known problem for you, but unfortunately I can't give you any details about the crash. In the space of 20 minutes I had my whole system go to a black screen and reboot XP five times.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>That is a serious problem. Please let us know if you see any error messages, or if you can associate the crashes with any particular pattern of your usage of Notation Composer or perhaps conflict with Notation Composer and some other software.
Cheers
-- Mark