Several movements in one file or several?

[uncompositor]

When composing multi-movement chamber pieces, would it be wiser to have all movements in one single file? Or for each movement to be in a separate file?
Especially regarding creating individual parts later on.

Thanks in advance.

[motet]

I think it depends on how big the piece is overall. It's more convenient to have everything in one file, and the movements can follow one another in the parts on the same page. If your piece is very large, though, Finale may perform better by breaking it up. You would need to print each movement beginning on a new page, though.

A third possibility would be to have the movements in separate files and then combine them with the Score Merger function at the end, prior to printing. I haven't used this personally, but I understand it works reasonably well, with perhaps a few glitches.

About how many measure and how many staves does your piece have total?

[uncompositor]

Thanks. I don't know yet how many staves it will have after setting a percentage-resizing in the formatting process, but the piece is relatively short at 200 measures.

[motet]

Should be ok to put everything in one file.

[HaraldS]

Be sure to use the JW New Piece plugin, it helped me a lot in producing clean parts with multiple mouvements.

[Piano Pete]

While I have always kept movements separate, I am currently working on a project for someone where they want everything in one Finale File. How would you go about efficiently creating all the title information at the beginning of each movement and have it translate to parts?

[motet]

A good way is to have a one-measure system between movements. You hide the staff, key signature, etc. with a staff style, but attach expressions to it for the title.

Use the measure attributes to force measures to begin a new system, force the display of the time signature, or to hide the cautionary time/key signature change in last measure of the previous movement.

[Piano Pete]

I found an old document floating around the web of yours, Motet, documenting how to add the first page information: composer, title, sub title etc, but I did not seem to have much success. For the text expression, is that just made within the dynamics tab of the expression tool (per Finale's documentation) or something else? I would love some clarification on this matter, as this is new waters for me--stupid parts >.<. Unfortunately, the piece I am engraving is not really large enough to warrant my normal workflow, but I guess change is good

[motet]

I don't recall that, but I did write something that had a complicated formula to make a movement title attached to the left barline be centered on the page. Honestly, I think the one-bar system between movements is easier, and automatically allocates vertical space. Then you can attach your title expression to it. Here's something you can look at:

[Peter Thomsen]

Attached is a similar example - with four linked parts.

[guinness28]

I'm looking at this post, thanks to motet and peter for the examples.

I understood that movement 2 was attached to a "blank" system, but do you have a special method to make it center automatically or is it manuel placing ?

Thanks

[motet]

Since the blank system is only one bar, you can center the expression between barlines.

[guinness28]

Ok but how do you do that ?

[motet]

center.png