Finale Forum

I got the upgrade of Finale basically only to be able to try out NotePerformer3.

I haven't installed all of my plugins, and made all my changes to default keys and whatnot, that will come this week.

but I have to say that I was completely blown away by how Noteperformer3 sounded, by default, with absolutely no tweaking, on a very large orchestral score.
The brass are gorgeous.

The one weakness, and I think this will always be with budget libraries (and even some expensive libraries have this problem) is that the strings are the weakest sound. They are a bit "buzzy", pretty synthy. I'm not sure if I prefer the Garritan strings, or the NotePperformer ones. Give me a few days to play with this.

I've been spoiled rotten by having my music played by some incredibly fine musicians lately, both chamber and orchestral, so sample libraries are always a let-down. But I am quite excited about NotePerformer.

now to get Finale 26.1 up and running properly.
I've already had one troublesome incident: when I exited Finale it restarted as though it had crashed. I don't know if this is going to be a recurring problem. I'll be sure to post if it happens again, if only to see if anyone else has had this issue.

I bought NotePerformer when it was on sale in April. For a quick ‘down and dirty’ playback, it is impressive. Before that, I was exporting as MusicXML and opening in Notion 6 ($79 cross-grade from Finale etc.). I prefer either to GIFF for this.

I have to say that NotePerformer3 sounds pretty amazing right "out of the box." I'm used to doing full-blown mockups in a DAW with high-end sample libraries for my orchestral mockups. Although NotePerformer isn't quite on that level, for just a little bit of effort, it creates a really nice mockup. It's certainly better than anything I've been able to produce in Finale with the various libraries it has.

My only problem with NotePerformer is that the playback stutters and has tiny dropouts and hiccoughs during playback. If I export the audio, it's fine, it's just during live playback in Finale. I've got a nearly-new Mac Mini (2018) with 64 GB of 2667 MHz DDR4 RAM running on a 3.2 GHz Intel i7 with 6 cores. That's a pretty hefty machine and I wouldn't expect that kind of stuttering on playback--it doesn't stutter if I use the ARIA instruments and Garritan libraries. I'm in Finale 26.1 on OS 10.14.5. I talked to the folks at Wallander and they say I should be getting smooth playback, even on large orchestral scores. Even after a reboot where Finale is the only thing running, it still happens. Is anyone else experiencing this?

hmm, interesting.
no I've had absolutely no playback problems as far as stuttering is concerned.
however, every once in a while, it's as if Finale is not sending signals for changes like pizz/arco.
this seems to be mostly with files that originated with much older versions of Finale. it works most of the time, but then there will be one measure where no matter what I do, it simply will not recognize the change.

I HAVE, however, had tiny issues with some instruments dropping out in the recording... and NOT during the actual playback.