Finale Forum

I have full Finale v26. I love it! But this week I found myself missing, of all things, PrintMusic. The reason is that I sometimes go a year without doing any scoring, and when I return to Finale, it has so darned many options that I can't seem to do anything without a dozen visits to the excellent ...

That would be stealing the product.

Details, details.

And I was going to ask for copies of MS Office, Photoshop, AutoCad, Cakewalk, Sibelius, Oracle, SAS, SPSS, Mathematica...

Also in simple entry: press the [r] key to convert the last note entered to a rest. (You can also toggle it back into a note by a second pressing of [r].)

Man, that is maddening. You are limited to character-at-a-time insertion (on Windows at least) using the despised Alt-codes. The web page at http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html#accent may be of some help. By the way, on my laptop I can't use the top-row numerals -- ...

Many Windows laptops let you press [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Left Arrow] to rotate the screen 90 degrees counterclockwise. If you can secure a wireless mouse on the floor, it may be doable. To rotate the screen back to "normal", press [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Up Arrow]. For me, it quickly became apparent that prin...

A couple of months ago I posted a suggestion that maybe the site needed a captcha setup as a spam catcher. Today the post got its first reply -- a spammer.

Bleep it.

If you're wanting to do some non-pitched percussion such as spoken words, you can use a single-line snare drum and then relabel the staff.

Pianos have been made of plastic -- transparent lucite, for example. And the piano on the Hindenburg was made of aluminum!

'Course, I have no idea how they sounded. It seems to me that a metal body would have its own resonances, not necessarily unpleasant.

Also, That Other Finale Forum -- http://forum.makemusic.com/default.aspx?f=5 -- has several "serious" orchestral composers from all over the world.

Over at the MakeMusic "official" forum, Mike Rosen mentions that the PM 2010 ":0" form of chord entry, such as "A:0", is now serving up a menu of almost 300 suffixes.

Amazingly, "Maj7" is not among them.

paynow wrote:I'm using PM 2010 which I just purchased. They are capitalized in 2009 apparently, but not in 2010.

Eeww! A disincentive to upgrade.

I do agree that more customization of tablature and percussion maps would be nice. However, I am slightly confused by one assertion: ...I definitely agree about the upper case M in Maj7. So does MakeMusic, apparently. What version are y'all running? The attached pic is from PM 2009. I entered them b...

f the following seems to treat you like an idiot, understand that it's what I would want done to me in this case. :-) When you go to Page Layout, that means click on the Page Layout icon (to activate it) and then select from the pull-down menu. Make sure that "Allow Individual Staff Spacing" is chec...

I've played on one of those Bosendorfers that go all the way down to C. By the time you get down to that near-subsonic range, the upper harmonics take over, and it sounds more like a 1970 sci-fi laser pistol (byool-byool-byool) than a musical instrument. I think 92 keys, going down to F, woulda been...

It almost sounds like the MIDI interface is sharing an interrupt with the mouse, or something weird like that. But before we worry about that (the solution to which would be beyond my over-the-forum capabilities), let's try a few questions to narrow it down a bit. (1) What input method did you use w...

I had one for a while, and it didn't work. After diddling with every driver-related solution I could come up with, a web search convinced me that the Uno fails too many people too often. I replaced it with the next model up, the MidiSport 2x2. Despite using the same drivers, it is much more stable t...

First, an Amen to Miker's suggestion of going through the tutorials and QuickStart. In addition to adjusting the staff (actually, "system") distances, you may be able to adjust the vertical placement of the lyric using the mouse on the arrow/chevron symbol ">" that appears in the left margin during ...

Miker's correct, but I would offer hope in a few categories: PrintMusic cannot: Make mid-measure time, key, or clef changes. --but it can do 'em at measure breaks Handle complicated coda/multiple repeat playback. --but it can notate them; it's only the auditioning part that is lacking Change notehea...

...Or however you spell it.

I wonder if it's time to put bot-trapper software in to slow down the spam-bunnies (Pamela being the latest as of this writing)? 'Course, I've always wondered if it's legal to sue the spammers' sponsors.

...but I couldn't stop mentally hearing the tubas replacing tympani in the opening to Thus Spake Zarathustra ... Vronk, vronk, vronk, vronk... that does mess up the drama a bit, doesn't it? (Ahem) Back to the question: On the instrument list, did you confirm that the MIDI channel is unique for the t...

It would really help us answer questions if you add information such as "what software I am running" to your signature block. For example, if you are running PrintMusic, you can achieve your goal using the grand staff (as others have suggested) plus the "Fit Measures" tool. You can further scale the...

That's not fair! I didn't define "line."

Please, answer the next question in terms of staves and systems. No lines.

Do you want two staves (one grand staff) per system to facilitate a piano fingering chart?

The ability to move a note like that, in small doses, is cool -- I hadn't realized PM could do that.

Is there any way to do that within the Simple Entry method?

Some vocabulary: Measures -- you know what they are already. Staves (plural of the word "staff," by the way) are linear collections of measures, growing to the right as you add measures. Systems are vertical groups of staves. An example of a system: Soprano and Alto in Staff 1, Tenor and Bass in Sta...

:) I have discovered a legit way to use X noteheads for spoken text in PM 2009, with the limitation that it gets its own staff. Add the following lines to instrument.txt : [INS:Spoken] Name = Spoken Words Abbr = Spk useKeySigs = 0 Transposition = 0 StaffType = single Clef = altpercussion Patch = Per...