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Questions before purchase

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:30 pm
by cheeseboy
I am trying to evaluate which Finale product would be the ideal purchase for me. I have minimal needs. I essentially need to be able to create scores for hymns (acapella, so no piano score required) with shaped notes, for a standard 4-part harmony. I need to be able to enlarge the score to a size that will be readily visible in a PowerPoint presentation (projected during worship services). I also need, due to the purposes which I intend, to be able to remove the staff names (which Finale notepad cannot do...if it could, I might just be comfortable with that alone).

Will PrintMusic suffice for my needs, or do I need to shell out for the full version?

As a side note, I have been using the fre demo for about two weeks, and am very fond of it. I prefer Finale over Sibelius at the moment, from what I have seen of the demos, so far.

Re: Questions before purchase

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:49 pm
by Michel R E
I believe there's a discount for people who work in churches, isn't there?

Re: Questions before purchase

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:04 pm
by miker
Have you found anything you want to do in PM that you can't do, so far? If you have a specific question, we may be able to answer it. For your initial questions, yes, there is a 7-shape note templates, and yes, you can remove staff names. I don't know what format you need for Powerpoint.

Keep in mind, though, that PM will no longer be supported or upgraded.

Re: Questions before purchase

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 3:29 am
by cheeseboy
Thats all I need. Thanks for the reply. Yes, there is a discount for educational/liturgical purposes, but thats still $230 more than PrintMusic. If there’s something I can’t do in PM, then we’ll have to upgrade, but it seems like that might meet our needs, for now. An upgrade to full Finale may be in the future anyway, but that will happen later. I do know that PM is no longer supported, and if/when it becomes unusable, that may be the time to upgrade. To create the slides I use, I create a custom page size of 13.33” x 7.5” (that’s the size of 16:9 .pptx files), then scale the staves up to around 265%. After that I use the graphics tool to export the pages as .jpgs or .pngs and paste those into a slide. That’s what I’m doing in the trial version atm, anyway, and with 18-point (bolded) font for the lyrics, it looks good on our screens. There are a lot of hymnal publishers that have already done this themselves, and they are all using Finale to do it, as far as I am aware, but there are some great old songs that are only in out of print hymnals that we own as a congregation, so we have to make slides ourselves. I appreciate all the information. Thanks for the help.