Finale Forum

Having a flat panel computer screen on the keyboard lets you play a score without the need for paper and page turning which is a great boon. My question is - if you have a number of scores that you want to play sequentially in natural succession, is there a way of loading and playing each one apart from opening each file manually and clicking play. For a live performance the time taken to do this manually would be intolerable to an audience apart from the distraction of doing it. Ideally something like a foot switch would move you on to the next piece.
Perhaps this is too much to expect.

Combine the scores into one big file. In newer versions of Finale, there is a utility called Score Merger, but I don't think your older Allegro has that.

Since Finale is primarily notation software, I doubt that they would add anything else.

Thanks for your reply again. When you say 'combine' the scores, do you mean from within Allegro? It only allows me to open multiple scores separately - I don't see a way of combining them from the tools and menus. Or do you mean something like the copy/append command from the windows command prompt?

Yes, I mean copy/append.
But keep your individual files, too!

I tried this but unfortunately Allegro only reads to the end of the first file in the combined files. Thanks anyway.

That's odd. Can you post a pair of files where this occurs?

Yes a1.mus a2.mus and the combined files a1a2.mus

It seems I will have to make two posts to achieve this.

Combined files

I guess I wasn't clear. You have to copy document 2, and paste the content onto the end of document 1.

Just make any key or time changes before you do the paste.

But don't the different pieces have to have the same number of staves to do that?

To wrap up this thread, Allegro clearly isn't capable of merging scores. You need Finale to do it

Aristotle wrote:But don't the different pieces have to have the same number of staves to do that?

Yes. You would have to set up the maximum number of staves at the beginning. You could delete them where they weren't being used, or, just leave them.

Aristotle wrote:To wrap up this thread, Allegro clearly isn't capable of merging scores. You need Finale to do it

Not true. You just don't want to do it the hard way. It CAN be done, even in PrintMusic.

It sounds like you want to play backup to yourself, soloing. Why not just make a CD of MP3 files, and you can adjust the space between them to suit yourself?

Can you open more than one file at a time in Allegro? As a suggestion, if you dont want to copy and paste files into one document, you could have several files open and switch between them quickly using Alt-W and 1, 2, 3 etc. and hit the play button. Almost as fast as turning a page of music.

Just as a post script - if anybody is comfortable running batch files from the Windows command prompt, the file below will successively open each .MUS file and wait until you exit Allegro before it opens the next one.
e.g. Make a file called run.bat in the directory where your .mus files are and type run.

Path=%Path%;c:\Program Files\Finale Allegro 2007
Allegro file1.MUS
Allegro file2.MUS
Allegro file3.MUS
etc