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All the numbers between 1 and 0, ascending

Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:45 pm
by GarryW
Running Finale 2014.5 on Windows...

My "Playback Settings" dialog box appears to be broken. When I click the "Playback Settings" button on Finale's main screen, this dialog pops up:
PlaybackSettings1.jpg
PlaybackSettings1.jpg (50.21 KiB) Viewed 1969 times
Which is all well and good. But then if I immediately click "OK", even without having changed any setting, I always get this:
PlaybackSettings2.jpg
PlaybackSettings2.jpg (9.22 KiB) Viewed 1969 times
and there do not appear to be any numbers "between 1 and 0" that I can type in that will make it happy. Much less allow me to change any of the playback settings.

What does it want?

thanks,
Garry

Re: All the numbers between 1 and 0, ascending

Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:54 pm
by zuill
That refers to one of the Repeat boxes. Those are both at 1, so that seems to fit the need of the warning. However, your measure numbers are really high. I wonder if that might be involved. Also, are your preferences set to display assigned measure numbers or actual measure numbers (program preferences)? If I could see the file itself, it would be a lot easier to diagnose.

Zuill

Re: All the numbers between 1 and 0, ascending

Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:39 pm
by GarryW
Repeats... measure numbers... I wouldn't have guessed. That's it!!

This is a little complex...

I have quite a long file (as you noticed.) Bunch of fiddle tunes. It has lots of repeats, and some "Go To Measure" indications". (I sometimes skip over unfinished bits while working on stuff downstream.)

Playback worked great. Then, a while ago I started having playback trouble. After a bit of thrashing around, I noticed that "Repeat / Check Repeats" displays a precomputed cache of what Finale, in advance, thinks the playback sequence of measures ought to be.

Precomputed cache? Bad idea.

As any software engineer knows :), in any "sufficiently complex" program containing jumps (multiple endings, DS's, DC's, etc), the playback sequence can and will depend on where you start. It cannot safely be precomputed. You're begging for trouble.

So, months ago, I disabled Finale's repeat caching mechanism by inserting, at the very beginning of the piece, a blank measure with a "Go To 9999" in it. Poof, all of my the playback sequence problems vanished. (Of course, I then had to start my playbacks somewhere other than measure 1.)

Fast forward:

If I remove the "Go To 9999", the recent "Please enter a number between 1 and 0" dialog error that I was complaining of vanishes. Woo-hoo! If I put it back in, the message re-appears.

Thanks for giving me the clue!

I will figure out a work-around.

(The Go To has been in there for months; don't why the dialog only just now started acting up.)

(The measure sequence cache is probably an obsolete feature, given the speed of modern computers.)

yours,
Garry