page view rearranges, duplicates staves

[meb]

I have an orchestral score which looks correct in scroll view but rearranges staves in page view.
Frequently there are staves that refuse to hide, and when their attributes are checked, they turn out to be blank copies of "piccolo."
Other staves are in the wrong place, such as Horns 3-4 below the percussion, flute below the viola, etc.
When I display a new page, I might find the piano above the brasses, or the violins in the reed section, even after repairing the previous 15 pages by hand.

I am spending more time addressing these errors (some unfixable, all supposed to be "automatic") than in composing and editing.

Does anyone have a suggestion?

[BuonTempi]

Hard to say without actually seeing a file.

I have seen weird duplicate "mirrors" of staves after mangling through ScoreMerger, but otherwise staves are pretty well-behaved, IME.

[motet]

Maybe try Reorder Staves from the Staff tool. If you find any stray staves, deleted them. I have occasionally unwantedly duplicated staves by double-clicking somewhere.

[meb]

Thanks for the ideas.

I worked for hours pulling staves apart and correcting all sorts of mistakes. The global CTRL+H command did not work, and the bass clarinet refused to budge. But I completely forgot about reordering staves. I will add that to the bag of tricks.

I finally gave up, created an entirely new template, copied the file into it, and then spent more time reconstructing the percussion staves. That isn't a very happy solution, either. So if anyone else has run across this problem, I hope they'll post a better solution.

Cheers.

[motet]

If you accidentally double-click on a staff's clef in the Staff tool it will add a new blank staff right underneath the one you clicked on, so I wonder if that's to blame. It used to be that you could double-click on a staff's handle to get to the staff properties, so I was in the habit of doing that (for some reason this feature was removed). It strikes me that being able to add a staff that way is a bad idea.

[meb]

Hi, Motet.
Interesting idea about clicking on a staff and getting an extra one. But I was getting SIX piccolo staves at once, and not by clicking. File looked fine in Scroll view. Page views were an ever-exciting journey; each new page was completely unpredictable. I did page "turns" by CTRL+PgDn, though. Have you found it to be a bug?

Anyway, I decided my file was corrupted, so I copied it CAREFULLY, line by line, into the new template. No behavior problems (knock wood) in the new file. I'm tempting fate by saying that.

I also wonder if these bugs occur because I double instruments on a single staff (e.g., flute1 and flute 2). I try to keep the score as compact as possible by making every instrument pair show up in Layers 1 and 2 on a given staff. I have a lot of trouble with playback, too. For example, Horn 1, in Layer 1, sounds much softer than Horn 2 in Layer 2, even though I've assigned each a separate instrument, separate channel, and made their volume levels identical (usually 101). I can try to assign mf to Horn 1 and mp or softer for Horn 2, yet Horn 2 bombards me with sound. I'm doing a lot of hair tearing over these problems. Of course I could assign every instrument his very own staff, but then the score gets really hard to work with because it occupies so much vertical space.
Maybe I'm just trying to get my OS (or Finale) to work too hard.

Thanks again, and cheers.

[motet]

Sounds like you did the right thing starting over with a new document.

I give each instrument its own staff and then combine them into Flute 1+2 at the very end for the printed score, hiding the originals. This avoids the problems of layers interfering with each other in playback, and you know just what will appear in the part. Staff sets may help with a large orchestra if you work in scroll view. You could program hotkeys to quickly switch among them.

[motet]

What would be great is if Implode or JW Staff Polyphony automatically put in "1.", "2.", and "a2" when necessary when combining two instruments on one staff. Or is there something that already does that?

[RMK]

What would be great is if Implode or JW Staff Polyphony automatically put in "1.", "2.", and "a2" when necessary when combining two instruments on one staff. Or is there something that already does that?

TGTools (full version) used to do this, but it has been broken for a number of years.