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Dissonance
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:00 pm
Finale Version: 2014.5
Operating System: Windows

Post by Dissonance » Wed Jul 17, 2019 4:34 am

So, on this Finale forum, there are a few people who know the program amazingly well. Also on this forum, there are a few people who know notation amazingly well. I count myself mediocre in both realms, but I have read much. The things I write below are informed by Read, Stone, and Gould. If you are interested in notation, you should read their books.

Fix the default templates: The spacings and margins are wrong, and all the text items are not accurately placed. These inaccuracies are reproduced throughout thousands of scores made by people who don’t know any better. You can right-click on a textbox and see that it is wrong.

For measures that are a double-whole or longer, make the default empty-measure rest a double-whole rest.

Document Options—Music Spacing—Avoid Collisions Of: Unisions of noteheads without stems (whole and double whole)

Document Options—Music Spacing—Avoid Collisions: Seconds, when one note is dotted and the other is not, place the dotted note to the right

This is a bug: When you assign a dynamic to L1, it aligns with L1. When you assign a dynamic to L2, it aligns with L2. Unfortunately, when you assign a dynamic to all layers, it aligns with L1 even if it collides with L2.

Have system margins use staff names to snap to the left page margin. Publishing requires exact margins, and this would save editors time.

Tuplets—Bracket Full Duration: After many years, this feature still does not work. It needs to add time space in the score for short-long triplets. In addition to the bracket extending to the third note of a triplet, sometimes it needs to extend to the sixth part of a triplet. It follows that options should account for any type of short-long tuplet, such as quintuplets.

Beaming over barlines has been a thing for 200 years (see Brahms) because composers communicate with beams. We should be able to beam over a barline without a plugin. Just saying. it's just a thing that is ubiquitous, so our tool (Finale) should follow.


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motet
Posts: 8195
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:33 pm
Finale Version: 2014.5,2011,2005,27
Operating System: Windows

Post by motet » Wed Jul 17, 2019 6:12 am

Good stuff, though I think few publishers would align staff names on the page margin. Usually they're right-justified a fixed distance from the staff, and Finale does this.

I'm curious which text blocks are commonly misplaced. If you really mean text blocks and not expressions, all the uses for those I can think of are extra-musical, like part names and page headers.

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miker
Posts: 5990
Joined: Fri Mar 13, 2009 4:28 pm
Finale Version: Finale 27.4
Operating System: Mac

Post by miker » Wed Jul 17, 2019 8:15 pm

I would suggest that you send them to Finale, or post them in the Feature Request section of the MM forum. Then, they will be officially noted. And promptly ignored, if past history is any indication...

https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics
Finale 27 | SmartScorePro 64
Mac OS 13.2.1 Ventura
Copyist for Barbershop Harmony Society

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