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| MakeMusic Forum > Public Forums > Finale - Windows - FORUM HAS MOVED! > Should I buy...? | Forum Quick Jump
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Chalky
Registered Member
      
Date Joined Feb 2000
Total Posts : 185
| Posted 6/8/2002 3:20 AM (GMT -6) |   |
I usually buy the Finale updates without much hesitation, but there seems to have been a considerable amount of adverse comment in the forum on the latest release. So could some friendly user inform me whether the following functions have been changed, since these are the most important shortfalls in the program for my personal use.
Playback. Can you now scroll with metronome and see the bottom of the score in scrolling page view ?
Playback (with ear). Do you still get odd sounds when passing time signature changes, clef changes, etc. ?
Copying. Is there now a ‘just copy what I wrote, don’t edit’ option.
Rests. Has Finale now informed other tools that a whole measure rest in ¾ time is worth three quarter notes ?
Rest placement. Does Finale still incorrectly place half note rests on even beats in 6/4 (and up) time ?
Lyrics menu. Can you now copy or clone or mirror lyrics between staves without going mad ?
Thanks in advance.
J Alex
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somusque
Developer
 
Date Joined Feb 1999
Total Posts : 1169
| Posted 6/9/2002 2:40 AM (GMT -6) | |
>Copying. Is there now a ‘just copy what
>I wrote, don’t edit’ option.
There always has been. You have to copy using drag and drop, NOT using copy & paste. If the destination measure is offscreen, scroll to there and ctrl-shift-click it.
The only clipboard commands that makes exact copies is Insert, which should be used for merging files.
Cheers,
Tobias
--------------------------------------------
Tobias Giesen, Composer
http://www.tobiasgiesen.de
* now all major works as free MP3's *
Check out TGTools, my plug-in collection for Finale:
http://www.tgtools.de
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Jari Williamsson
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 1998
Total Posts : 3246
| Posted 6/9/2002 6:38 AM (GMT -6) | |
On 6/8/2002 8:20:00 AM, J Alex WHYTE wrote:
>Playback. Can you now scroll
>with metronome and see the
>bottom of the score in
>scrolling page view ?
Where's the problem here? I can't reproduce this. How tall are your systems (how many staves)?
>Playback (with ear). Do you
>still get odd sounds when
>passing time signature
>changes, clef changes, etc. ?
You mean notes from the first measure? No change here.
>Copying. Is there now a ?just copy what
>I wrote, don?t edit? option.
In addition to what Tobias said, if you copy whole measures (not partial measures), Finale will copy the measures as you wrote them. Should work in all Finale versions, AFAIK.
>Rests. Has Finale now informed other
>tools that a whole measure rest in ¾
>time is worth three quarter notes ?
I don't see the logic here. If you entered a whole _note_ in 3/4, should Finale consider that whole note to be 3 beats?
>Rest placement. Does Finale still
>incorrectly place half note rests on
>even beats in 6/4 (and up) time ?
Do you have an example of this (such as a small sample file)? I don't see any problems with how it works in Fin2002a.
>Lyrics menu. Can you now copy or clone
>or mirror lyrics between staves without
>going mad ?
No change: If you're going mad or not depends on your skill level.
Best regards,
Jari Williamsson
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KennethKen
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 1998
Total Posts : 2570
| Posted 6/9/2002 7:20 AM (GMT -6) | |
On 6/9/2002 11:38:00 AM, Jari Williamsson wrote:
>>Rests. Has Finale now informed other
>>tools that a whole measure rest in ¾
>>time is worth three quarter notes ?
>
>I don't see the logic here. If you
>entered a whole _note_ in 3/4, should
>Finale consider that whole note to be 3
>beats?
>
I think J Alex is referring to putting in a real whole measure rest in 3/4 time. This is done when two parts share a staff and one part rests while the other plays. Also, if you want to put a fermata over the bar. The question is does Finale still make you go through the "There are too many beats in this measure, idiot!" message?
>>Rest placement. Does Finale still
>>incorrectly place half note rests on
>>even beats in 6/4 (and up) time ?
>
>Do you have an example of this (such as
>a small sample file)? I don't see any
>problems with how it works in Fin2002a.
>
I think J Alex doesn't want half note rests to start on even number beats . They should cover beats 1-2, 3-4 or 5-6.
Is that right, J Alex?
Ken
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Jari Williamsson
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 1998
Total Posts : 3246
| Posted 6/9/2002 7:33 AM (GMT -6) | |
On 6/9/2002 12:20:00 PM, Kenneth Amis wrote:
>The question is
>does Finale still make you go through
>the "There are too many beats in this
>measure, idiot!" message?
That question will display only if you want it. Turn it on/off in "Speedy/Check for Extra Notes" and "Simple/Check for Extra Notes"
>I think J Alex doesn't want half note
>rests to start on even number beats .
>They should cover beats 1-2, 3-4 or 5-6.
>
>Is that right, J Alex?
You mean that the half note rests should be horizontally centered between the beats? That would be incorrect notation. For references, for example take a look in Gardner Read, Example 7-2.
Best regards,
Jari Williamsson
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KennethKen
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 1998
Total Posts : 2570
| Posted 6/9/2002 7:56 AM (GMT -6) | |
On the issue of "Too many beats...", I think what J Alex (and I) would like is to be able to leave it on to watch our back, but to be more intelligent about it. i.e., If the only thing in the measure for a particular layer when we exit the layer is the whole measure rest Finale can assume that the rest is intentional.
On the issue of half note rests. Imagine a 6/4 measure with a quarter note (crotchet) on the 1st and last beat. Should there be two half note rest in the middle or, if the measure is divided into three, a quarter-half-quarter rest? Right now, I think Finale defaults to the former.
Ken
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Fred G. Unn
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2002
Total Posts : 1268
| Posted 6/9/2002 8:55 AM (GMT -6) | |
I honestly don't have a problem with the 6/4 thing. Since 6/4 can be divided into 2 groups of 3 or 3 groups of 2 depending on the situation, I don't think Finale should be expected to notate the rests correctly. Once you've exceeded 4 quarters in a bar there are too many notational options. I would rather notate it the way I want it rather than have Finale guess what I want.
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KennethKen
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 1998
Total Posts : 2570
| Posted 6/9/2002 9:08 AM (GMT -6) | |
I don't think I've ever seen a 6/4 measure where the music is group in two such that the half rest begin on even beats. e.g., quarter note - half rest - quarter note - half rest. Such measures are usually notated as if they were two 3/4 measures without the barline.
Ken
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GT
It was some other guy.
Date Joined Feb 2001
Total Posts : 1434
| Posted 6/9/2002 9:43 AM (GMT -6) | |
On 6/9/2002 11:38:00 AM, Jari Williamsson wrote:
[Regarding Lyric question] No change: If you're going mad or not depends on your skill level.
Jari, this sounds a tad condescending. I don't see what J. Alex's skill level has to do with a Lyric Tool that we all know is and has been buggy for a long while.
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Jari Williamsson
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 1998
Total Posts : 3246
| Posted 6/9/2002 10:01 PM (GMT -6) | |
On 6/9/2002 2:43:00 PM, Anonymous wrote:
>Jari, this sounds a tad condescending. I
>don't see what J. Alex's skill level has
>to do with a Lyric Tool that we all know
>is and has been buggy for a long while.
Sorry, I didn't mean it like that.
With "your" I didn't refer to J. Alex personally, I referred to a more general/plural "your".
What I really meant was that if you have a technical understanding of how lyrics works (of how raw text blocks are treated in Lyrics and how the syllables are connected in the database), many of the Lyrics problems can be avoided/worked-around.
But if you expect the Lyrics Tool to behave logically from a user's point of view, you have the same "buggy tool" as last year.
Best regards,
Jari Williamsson
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Scott Amort
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 1999
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 6/10/2002 7:21 AM (GMT -6) | |
>What I really meant was that if you have
>a technical understanding of how lyrics
>works (of how raw text blocks are
>treated in Lyrics and how the syllables
>are connected in the database), many of
>the Lyrics problems can be
>avoided/worked-around.
>But if you expect the Lyrics Tool to
>behave logically from a user's point of
>view, you have the same "buggy tool" as
>last year.
Doesn't this contradict a fundamental programming principle? The end user should never be required to understand the inner workings of the program. He/she should only need to know the end result(s) of using a command or feature (in this case, the lyric tool). If this tool does not do what the user expects, based on the manual or menu description, then it is a bug (either in the documentation, or the actual code). I would always expect a tool (or the entire program, for that matter) to 'work logically from a user's point of view'.
Regards,
Scott
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Jari Williamsson
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 1998
Total Posts : 3246
| Posted 6/10/2002 9:39 AM (GMT -6) | |
On 6/10/2002 12:21:00 PM, Scott Amort wrote:
> The end user
>should never be required to
>understand the inner workings
>of the program.
Absolutely.
> If this tool
>does not do what the user
>expects, based on the manual
>or menu description, then it
>is a bug (either in the
>documentation, or the actual
>code).
I don't know if Finale actually work differently than the documentation of the Lyrics Tool, perhaps it doesn't.
But it surely work differently from what computer users today would expect.
I guess most of the code for the Lyrics Tool is very old by now. The computers used 7-10 years ago were so much slower than today, that different kinds of "solutions" were needed to maintain a high speed for large documents (such as the "Edit Lyrics" dialog and non-automatic word extensions).
With today's computer speeds and the evolution of all kinds of UI issues, the users would expect much more.
If you need advice on how to send feature requests to Coda or what to write, let me know. :-)
Best regards,
Jari Williamsson
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Chalky
Registered Member
Date Joined Feb 2000
Total Posts : 185
| Posted 6/10/2002 10:17 AM (GMT -6) | |
Hi, everybody. Thanks for the replies. Sorry about the delay (choral weekend in the mountains, lousy weather, great food).
All the points in my original message have been discussed in threads going back to F 98.
Playback. Gordon Jacobs book says strings play during 72 per cent of classical works, so I work first there in orchestral score page view. I drag down to Violins, drag up for Horn melody, down to strings and then hit playback. The screen jumps to Flute, and my invisible strings are at knee level. Sure, Staff Sets and all that, but should I have to?
Playback first sound across measure breaks.
Annoying. I hoped it was fixed.
Rests. Try copying Rachmaninov's Vespers: because of half note rests on any beat you get misaligned columns of rests in full score. Readable but scruffy. Apparently not fixed.
"Just copy what I input" I posted an example of this years back (drag and drop where Finale edited the rests and beaming in the copy so that it was different from the source) and the forum agreed with me. Still not fixed?
Lyrics. Several threads in the last year have adversely commented on this aspect. No change?
Whole note rests. Layers, indeed, are the problem here, as you say. No change, it appears.
Looks like I can do without this update.
Regards to all, and thanks.
J Alex
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