How to clean a Finale File

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TonyEastwood
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Post by TonyEastwood » 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! )
compostions at https://guitarcompositions.wordpress.com/


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John Ruggero
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Post by John Ruggero » Fri Oct 22, 2021 10:42 pm

I am sure there are better answers, but all else having failed, you might make it a PDF, have scanning software like SmartScore recognize it, export that as an MusXML file, then import it back into Finale.
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miker
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Post by miker » Fri Oct 22, 2021 11:14 pm

That’s a good idea, John.

Tony, if you don’t have scanning software, send me a sample piece. I’ll be happy to run it and see how it works.

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mmike
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Post by mmike » Sat Oct 23, 2021 6:45 am

I might misunderstand what you want as your final result, but if you want to retain exclusively notes and their values, it seems to me if you Select All, and do a Clear Selected Items procedure (excepting Notes and Rests and if you need to, also Tempo and Rehearsal Marks perhaps), that's what you'll get. I have often done this when transferring musical material to a totally different instrumentation.

You could also achieve this by exporting a MIDI file. Best to clean your file a little first, such as clearing Articulations, for instance, and make sure that each staff is on a separate channel. I'm not sure what happens with layers, it might be best to first separate them to different staves/channels. When you then open this MIDI file as a new document, you need to fiddle a bit with the quantization settings, but generally this has also worked very well for me.
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TonyEastwood
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Post by TonyEastwood » Sat Oct 23, 2021 9:14 am

RE: I might misunderstand what you want as your final result, but if you want to retain exclusively notes and their values.

Well understood: (And I have tried "clear all" ). Unfortunately this leaves all the micro adjustments set by the special tools (note placement, accidental placement, beam angle/length etc) not does it reset the bar lengths. After 'select all' | "clear all" I can do 'unlock' 'select all' | 'music spacing' | 'apply note spacing' to current part' but the result is not great - many notes don't in even appear within their bars.

(Actually I just tried it - its a little better than I expected notes fall off the right hand page edges (sorry it won't let me attach a screenshot)

Via PDF to scan feels a little Draconian, but may work. I've attached part of a piece if 'miker' (above) want to try it. Miker: I've also mailed it direct to you its too big to attach here. I'm curious about the result. I put all my music in the public domain so don't worry about the copyright etc.

Probably I should learn the MusicXML model - the micro adjustments are most likely special attributes. If they are it would be trivial for me to strip them out or replace them with default values. Bar lengths might be harder but no doubt a default can be calcuated from the constants of the bars. As I explained I do this, (and reverse engineering!), for a living. If it worked I'd put my code in the public domain (it would be in Java) so others would have this power too!
Attachments
TEST1.musx
(224.4 KiB) Downloaded 48 times
compostions at https://guitarcompositions.wordpress.com/

mmike
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Post by mmike » Sat Oct 23, 2021 10:54 am

(And I have tried "clear all" ). Unfortunately this leaves all the micro adjustments set by the special tools (note placement, accidental placement, beam angle/length etc) not does it reset the bar lengths. After 'select all' | "clear all" I can do 'unlock' 'select all' | 'music spacing' | 'apply note spacing' to current part' but the result is not great - many notes don't in even appear within their bars.
After you have done this, if you Select All and Update the layout (Ctrl-U) everything looks just fine (I just tried this with your file and it seems to work). If you still have other details to fix, try the JW Change Plug-in, there are many parameters you can reset.
Finale 3.7 > 27.4.1, GPO5, ASUS laptop, 18.4'' display, Intel Core i7, 32GB RAM, WIN 10 Pro, Cubase

TonyEastwood
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Post by TonyEastwood » Sat Oct 23, 2021 7:55 pm

MMike

Interesting : "update layout". I'd always assumed that was the same as 'apply note spacing' ! I live and learn.

thanks

Tony
compostions at https://guitarcompositions.wordpress.com/

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miker
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Post by miker » Sat Oct 23, 2021 8:57 pm

I was taught to always do them both: CMD-4, followed by CMD-U
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RimasG
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Post by RimasG » Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:11 am

Sometimes I use a primitive but effective method: I leave only the first measure of the file, and delete all the other measures completely. Of course, the contents of that first measure have to be deleted. The library retains all the basic file settings, the prepared texts and the remarks. Adding as many bars as needed is no problem.
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motet
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Post by motet » Sun Oct 24, 2021 5:46 pm

That can still result in stray hairpins. There's a bug.

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