Finale Forum

For some reason, I opened up Finale today and playback does not work. I have it in scroll view, I hit play, the green bar starts to scroll, then freezes and nothing happens. Finale itself is not frozen, I can hit stop and it stops. It worked last night. I have attached two files, "Spark of Courage" worked fine yesterday, no longer plays. "M to the Third" is what I opened today hoping to work on. (I'm a teacher in this wonderful distance learning environment and trying to make practice tracks for my middle school orchestra.) Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks and stay safe!

The first one works fine for me.
Check your Device Settings, and Score Manager, be sure nothing has changed.
I had the selected Instruments disappear before and had to be reloaded.
Speakers on and turned up...?

Restarted computer?

Thanks for your help! Score Manager, Device Settings no change but what you said about the instruments disappear before, I started poking around and went to Device Setup, Rescan for VST plugins and it reloaded the instruments and now it works.

Confused with Finale's complicated playback options--why would VST plugins affect this when I have "Play Finale through MIDI" selected?

Back to zero again. It stopped playing again. Even if I rescan for VST again, it doesn't play. Speakers on, turned up, tried restarting Finale, tried restaring the computer. No luck.

I have Finale 2014.5 like you. When I switched to Windows 10, I found that "Play Finale through MIDI" no longer worked. But you can play the SoftSynth sounds through VST if you don't want the overhead of the Garritan stuff. Another oddity is that when I first open a file, I can play it back fine (through VST), but "MIDI thru"--the sound you hear as you input notes on a MIDI keyboard--doesn't work until I switch to "Play Finale through MIDI" and then back to "Play Finale through VST." And, if I try to do that switch with the Score Manager open, Finale hangs forever.

Thanks for your help. Unfortunately, none of that worked. This is so frustrating. It's been working for years. Now all of a sudden, it no longer works. Anyone else have a suggestion as to what I should look into? I've even uninstalled and reinstalled.

Presumably other audio works on your computer. I tried one of your files, and after switching to VST it worked. But every system is different.

Have you explored all the Audio Driver settings in Audio Setup?

I use ASIO, but while Finale is loaded, other Windows audio doesn't work. I've tried the other settings to no avail.

Finale really is a dog's breakfast.

Yes, I've gone through Audio Setup... several times.

So I've taken my files to another laptop and they play fine. So I'm thinking that it must be some sort of setup on my original laptop.

HOWEVER, now that I've restarted my computer today, it plays again, but only through VST. When I have it set to play through MIDI, the play scroll bar moves, levels are seen in the Mixer, but there is no sound. Now what? So crazy.

As I said,

motet wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 14, 2020 5:42 am

I have Finale 2014.5 like you. When I switched to Windows 10, I found that "Play Finale through MIDI" no longer worked. But you can play the SoftSynth sounds through VST if you don't want the overhead of the Garritan stuff.

Yes, however, VST doesn't allow me to export to MP3. I need smaller files to upload to my students' Google drive. WAV files are too big to upload and too big for them to download onto their small capacity Chromebooks. I must have MP3 capability.That is the solution that I am trying to solve. And like I said, it has been working for years. It just suddenly stopped working, not very convenient during this time of distance learning.

bw00ds wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 18, 2020 9:55 pm

Yes, however, VST doesn't allow me to export to MP3. I need smaller files to upload to my students' Google drive. WAV files are too big to upload and too big for them to download onto their small capacity Chromebooks. I must have MP3 capability.That is the solution that I am trying to solve …

My guess is that with VST you must first export to WAV, and then convert the WAV to MP3 (via some third party software, such as Audacity or iTunes).

Well, I just went into Device Setup..., MIDI Setup and selected Default MIDI output device and it is now working again. I've done this several times in the last two or three days and it didn't work. It's decided to work today. This is crazy.

I've had some weird things of this type over the years (but not exactly what you described.) Sometimes it's due to some Microsoft Update which, while intended for some non-audio thing, still affects audio. It can be an interference with the audio due to timing or the like.

Another possibility is some type of background program interfering. I had (unrelated to Finale) a problem printing (and found other with the same problem). The McAfee firewall messed up timing so I couldn't print from the laptops. I could print from a ethernet-connected desktop. None of the usual suspects (Microsoft, HP, Office Depot, other help sites, etc.) were able to help. I took about two years before I found out that McAfee's firewall produced the failure (when combined with one of the Microsoft updates); it happened suddenly. It was a timing issue. I'm mentioning this because timing can also mess up audio.

Bluetooth affect my sound. On one of my computers (all supposedly running identical software), I have to tell bluetooth to use the headphones else I get Finale's "error 7, audio engine failed to load." If I wait a bit, Finale moves to the next output device.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It gives me good things to check out. Such a process...

Peter Thomsen wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 18, 2020 10:05 pm

bw00ds wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 18, 2020 9:55 pm

Yes, however, VST doesn't allow me to export to MP3. I need smaller files to upload to my students' Google drive. WAV files are too big to upload and too big for them to download onto their small capacity Chromebooks. I must have MP3 capability.That is the solution that I am trying to solve …

My guess is that with VST you must first export to WAV, and then convert the WAV to MP3 (via some third party software, such as Audacity or iTunes).

I may have to resort to that. Just another step, more time consuming... I did discover, however, that even though it doesn't play, it still saves a correct MP3. So I guess one solution is to do playback in VST to make sure that I have everything correct, then switch back to MIDI and save it. Such bother. Would prefer to just find the soluition of course.

I have to switch to MIDI and back to VST every time I open Finale in order to hear playback. Using the Alt key makes it a litte easier: Alt+DM = MIDI, Alt+DV = VST.

In my case, I switched from Windows to Mac and all of my old files were opening but no sound. After many hours trying everything I found a solution: on MIDI/AUDIO check Play Through Audio Units AND Reassign Playback Sounds. Not sure why but it worked in my case.