How to clean a Finale File
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:45 pm
I'm looking for advice as to how to cleanup a score which has been worked on for intensively . By cleanup I don't mean preparing for publication, I mean set each bar to the "state" it would have been automatically put in in when the notes were newly entered.
Perhaps I should explain that I write principally for classical guitar – classical guitar crams an excessive amount of material onto one stave. This means one is constantly using layers, and in addition fingering expression and articulation are somehow to be fitted in. Hence one has to make frequent recourse to all special tools etc (guitar is often in three parts - but 'up' and 'down' only provides two tail directions). Just to make life worse guitarists can't turn the pages when playing – there is a premium on getting a terrific amount of music onto no more than three pages – usually setting the sizes of each measure by hand etc.
Unfortunately it seems almost impossible to undo a lot of the special modifications, e.g. when re-using the same material for orchestra etc.
I've tried many approaches (including all the built in menu options) , however creating a new document and pasting sections in brings with it much of the complex over formatting of the original. I've also tried import/export via musicXML, but that is remarkably faithful in preserving the fancy quirky features.
By analogy when one works with text once the formatting is haywire one can take the whole text paste into notepad++ and pasting back in.
If there are existing posts on this topic I can't find them. One approach I have considered is writing code to modify the musicXML (My 'day job' is to write code industrially to modify complex XML's, but, to be honest, I wanted to concentrate on the music outside of work! )
Perhaps I should explain that I write principally for classical guitar – classical guitar crams an excessive amount of material onto one stave. This means one is constantly using layers, and in addition fingering expression and articulation are somehow to be fitted in. Hence one has to make frequent recourse to all special tools etc (guitar is often in three parts - but 'up' and 'down' only provides two tail directions). Just to make life worse guitarists can't turn the pages when playing – there is a premium on getting a terrific amount of music onto no more than three pages – usually setting the sizes of each measure by hand etc.
Unfortunately it seems almost impossible to undo a lot of the special modifications, e.g. when re-using the same material for orchestra etc.
I've tried many approaches (including all the built in menu options) , however creating a new document and pasting sections in brings with it much of the complex over formatting of the original. I've also tried import/export via musicXML, but that is remarkably faithful in preserving the fancy quirky features.
By analogy when one works with text once the formatting is haywire one can take the whole text paste into notepad++ and pasting back in.
If there are existing posts on this topic I can't find them. One approach I have considered is writing code to modify the musicXML (My 'day job' is to write code industrially to modify complex XML's, but, to be honest, I wanted to concentrate on the music outside of work! )