Add Staves: staves appear only on last page

[Elwood]

I've finished the piano and vocal parts of a song on my first Finale project, and want to add staves for a chorus, bass, and violin, but the new staves are added only at the very end of the document. I think the term is the last "system" (line of measures) has the added staves, but they're absent before that. I have only three staves now and want to add three more. Finale PrintMusic 2007 says it supports up to 24 staves. Can staves only be added before one starts adding notes? I'm using Mac OS X 10.4.9 on a dual G5. I'd sure appreciate any guidance.

[Elwood]

I might add that everything works fine in scroll view, but even with notes throughout the staff, it still appears only in the last line. Very confusing...

[Elwood]

I found the solution: I exported the file to MusicXML and opened that. I suspect the problem may be related to the fact that I had adjusted the spacing between some staves to allow room for several verses of lyrics.

[at8ax]

I'm not exactly sure what wall you're running into (there are so many!), but I suspect that at least part of your problem will be solved when you read up on Optimization in the manual. With Finale products, it's not so much adding staffs where you need them as it is making them go away where you *don't* need them.

[Elwood]

I can't find Optimize in my PDF manual or see it in the menus, so I suspect Optimize is not a feature of PrintMusic. Maybe I'll have to upgrade if I keep running into things like this. I'm really getting to like this program, and it's a great educational tool. This forum is a very valuable resource, too!

[Peter Thomsen]

PrintMusic doesn't have Finale's feature "Optimization".
However, in PrintMusic you can do the same thing manually:

In PrintMusic you can toggle on "Allow Individual Staff Spacing".
When you do that in Finale, Finale displays an icon to the right of the system, telling that "Allow Individual Staff Spacing" is toggled on.
I suppose that also PrintMusic displays this icon?

When you have toggled on "Allow Individual Staff Spacing", switch to PrintMusic's Staff Tool, and you will see an extra, lower handle on each staff.

When that lower handle is selected, you can nudge the staff up/down with the arrow keys, and the staff will be moved up/down in that system only.

If you instead hit the delete key, the selected staff will be removed in that system only.
You can still see the staff in Scroll View.
This trick works even if the staff isn't empty.

You can add staves later, but the added staves will not show up in the systems where "Allow Individual Staff Spacing" was toggled on.


Finale's feature Optimization is basically a utility that checks, what staves that are empty in each system, and removes the empty staves only.

I suppose that PrintMusic can also toggle off "Allow Individual Staff Spacing"?
If it can, then that is the solution to your problem:
If new, added staves don't appear in systems where "Allow Individual Staff Spacing" is toggled on, just toggle off "Allow Individual Staff Spacing".


Peter

[Elwood]

Thanks, Peter, it works in MakeMusic just as you describe. As for the new staves not appearing, I found it explained in the Page Layout menu, not in the Staff menu where I had expected it. I really appreciate your explaining that.

[Elwood]

Manually optimizing in PrintMusic by removing unused systems worked pretty well for the first few systems, but I ran into a display problem where music from later systems came into view, as expected, but much of it was off the page and there were so many vertical lines it was nearly unreadable. A real mess. Oh well. When I hide staves to print the music for the individual band members, I should be able to manually optimize that, which is more important than optimizing the whole bunch. I sure do appreciate the tip, though.