In Finale PrintMusic for windows, green playback bar

[janblum]

the green playback bar consistently disappears for no reason and twice I have had to uninstall and reinstall which is a real pain to have to do.... other times I have just not used the program for a couple of weeks and the green bar mysteriously reappears! Should not have to be dealing with this...Help?

[babryanton]

Hi,
Are you talking about the Playback Control box? I am using a Mac so perhaps mine is a bit different... But if you are talking about the Playback Control box, you can turn it off / on by going (in PrintMusic) to the Window menu and check the Playback Controls off or on.

[janblum]

No, I'm referring to the green (on my program) cursor/tracking bar that follows each note or stack throughout the composition as you play it back....it follows all the measure stacks and when it "disappears for no reason" your music is "frozen" on the first page even as you hear it play in entirety. Very frustrating!

[miker]

My first suggestion would be to restart the computer when that happens, and see if that helps, rather than reinstalling the program. I suspect that it's a conflict in your system, rather than a flaw in the program.

My next suggestion would be to listen in scroll view, rather than page view.

[babryanton]

...it "disappears for no reason" your music is "frozen" on the first page even as you hear it play in entirety.

Oh! Okay. I've had that happen to me before too. It usually happened when I had a complex music file and I didn't have the repeats / codas etc working correctly. So it would keep playing right to the end but the green thing got stuck - it didn't know what to do / where to go - because it couldn't read what / how i entered things in the score. ....So if you have a complex file, you may want to take note of where it stops playing because around that area, it's getting confused, so maybe you can work to fix that spot.

But as miker said, yes, I'd start with a restart first. It's amazing how much 'garbage' gets left around by programs & that can often clean things back up. But if that doesn't do the trick, then you might have to analyze / fine tune your file.

Good luck!