Copying parts from one score to another in Finale is CRAP

Leland · Post by **Leland** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 6:53 pm

I swear, I'm at the end of my rope...

A single full score file was handed to me and to our percussion section (same file, copied to two different computers). It originally had blank staves for the drums, which came with block-shaped clefs, and the original snare staff was a single line.

They've written their parts, and I want to simply take them from their copy and drop them onto the file that I've already laid out with rehearsal numbers, title, copyright/arranger info, and other stuff like that.

Okay, I figure that Mass Edit would work. I go to the score with the drum parts added in, Select Region... for those particular staves from beginning to end, and hit Copy. Then, I go to the other score, select the same staves, then hit Paste.

So, for reasons known only to God and the bloated code lurking inside Finale, it rewrites EVERYTHING. Even the snare drum part has been transposed down, far off of its single-line staff, and with several ledger lines. Tonal bass drums that were arranged in thirds (that is, only in the spaces of a five-line staff) are now in a stepwise motion -- they now go space-line-space-line. The mallet parts have suddenly transposed as well, even though their staff attributes -- on BOTH scores -- are set with the Transpose option "off".

Why -- WHY -- doesn't this work? Why can't I just have a command that says, "Take everything that I just selected and put it in this other score."?

Finale makes me hate my workday. There are other things that bug me, sure, but if I have to do stuff with Finale, I come home in a deep funk. I could rant nonstop for a full day about why I think Finale is a pile of garbage (why, yes, I think it makes sense to shove five objects on top of each other to create an unintelligible blob; I guess that nobody reads music, right?), but I really don't want to. Not right now, anyway.

All I want to do is copy percussion parts from one score and put them into another with all of their notes in the right place and with the correct noteheads. It's such a simple request. It should be easy, right?

SplatterTone · Post by **SplatterTone** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 7:26 pm

As I have said before: Never try to use Finale in the presence of children.

It still amazes me that (as far as I have been able to determine) the requirement for those archaic ALT-<number> sequences is still around in version 2006. And one still must go around changing accidental flats to sharps or sharps to flats because the program is completely ignorant of standard rules of harmony and part writing.

It might provide lots of customizing features, but the level of "intelligence" built into the program makes Alice Tinker look like a genius.

Leland · Post by **Leland** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 7:32 pm

I can't switch to another program, at least not for a couple of years. We have hundreds of Finale documents already, and we only just had the money last summer to throw to the 2006 version upgrade.

Recommendations for other software, I'm sorry to say, won't matter to me. If it were my own operation and I was starting from scratch, I'd definitely use something else and try to get my money back.

FarahShazam · Post by **FarahShazam** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:06 pm

I'm on the copy staff at work (we use finale).

There is a way to cut and paste everything in mass edit. You need to go into the mass edit properties and set them to what you want to copy over.

Also, if the person who entered in the music didn't know how to attach expressions to the parts, you are out of luck. There is a way to retro attach them as well.

It is pretty complicated to explain without showing you how to do it, but if you google finale help in the newsgroups, you should find screen caps and whatnot. good luck!

Leland · Post by **Leland** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:11 pm

I know that there's an Items To Copy... menu selection, and it gives a whole bunch of options. With everything selected, it still screws up the percussion parts. Is there something that I should deselect instead?

DonShirer · Post by **DonShirer** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 9:39 pm

I too had trouble once in copying Finale percussion parts, until I realized that I had not set up the staff I was copying them to as a percussion part with the same properties as the one I was copying from.

That was one of the reasons I am now using another program for 2/3 of my work. You can guess the one I mean--named for a composer. I can also transfer my Finale files to it with very few problems.

Leland · Post by **Leland** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 9:45 pm

I've been trying to set the properties for the destination staff the same as the one I'm coming from, and I don't know what else to change.

Why can't I take one staff's style properties and move them onto a staff in another document?

Have I said today that I hate Finale? Oh yeah, sorry, I already did...

Chuck(G) · Post by **Chuck(G)** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 1:07 am

DonShirer wrote:That was one of the reasons I am now using another program for 2/3 of my work. You can guess the one I mean--named for a composer. I can also transfer my Finale files to it with very few problems.

No kidding. I was given a Finale score to work on recently. I opened it with Finale, exported it as an ETF and read it with Sibelius. Now I can work with it.

LoyalTubist · Post by **LoyalTubist** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 8:10 am

Right, Chuck. I always tell you guys that Sibelius is great!

ZNC Dandy · Post by **ZNC Dandy** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 9:41 am

I despise Finale with my limited exposure to it. For one major reason...I use mainly to transpose parts, put things in bass clef etc etc etc and there is no feature to scan the original part in and just have it do do what I ask automatically. Is there any program that does this out there? Seems like it would make alot of sense to produce a program like this.

MaryAnn · Post by **MaryAnn** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 12:00 pm

Sorry I can't help; I feel the same way you do. 2000b worked pretty well on my ancient PC. Then I bought a Mac and got 2005 and everything just went to hell. Every time I try to friggin do something in Finale it either won't do it at all or it does something completely off the wall. I get madder and madder and finally just shut the thing off. I've gone back to composing on paper, by hand.

Every new release has new bells and whistles that DON'T WORK and there is never, EVER, a release that has everything working. I don't want the goddam bells and whistles, I just want a program that doesn't have BUGS in it. Finale does not EVER get there, and they have got all persnickity about allowing you only two installations and blah blah blah who wants their stupid program ANYWAY? The only reason I still have it is that it is the program my publisher wants music submitted in.

Yech.

MA

BVD Press · Post by **BVD Press** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 12:04 pm

Hi Leland,

If you want to send me the files I will see what I can do for you. Since I purchased Cimarron 2 years ago, I have used Finale to re-engrave app. 300 titles and release an additional 250+ titles. The re-engraves involved copying and pasting from the original files to my template. Granted many did not involve percussion, only minor issues cropped up every now and then. I find Finale to be fast, reliable and let's you do just about anything you would like. With all the positives I stated, I wish they would take their buigs and customer bas seriously. They have continually ignored both and have lost more customers to Sibelius than they probably could have ever imagined!

I have SiIbelius and use it to convert files to XML and then back to FInale. For what I do, I find Sibelius very limiting. I probably don't know the program well enough to actually comment on it, but when I have used it there have been many things the program could not handle. I called Sieblius and asked how to to them and I was told their program did not do this.

Both are good programs, but it really depends upon what you need a notation program for. Out of the box, I find Sibelius to be by far the best program out there. After you get into the programs, I find Finale to be the best option for what a I do. I am famliar with Notion, but when I checked it out I found its notation to be somewhat limiting. Maybe it has or will improve in the future. It is already a crowded market, but one more program might push the others to get better!

passion4tuba · Post by **passion4tuba** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 8:37 pm

Sibelius 4 is the best program, my school has that. One of my band director uses that like a pro, I was amazed at all you can do on it (ALOT!!!). I have Finale Notepad at home since it's free...it sucks.

SplatterTone · Post by **SplatterTone** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 9:27 pm

The comments I hear suggest that Finale lets you do more.
NOTE: YOU do.
Not the program do, YOU do.

If you want the program itself to exhibit a little intelligence. Well, it will. A little. Very little. Very, very ... VERY little.

A good display of the difference in intelligence between the programs is to have a reasonably good piano player play music into the real-time record and notate chunk of the two programs. With Sibelius, you don't have to manually tap a pedal or some device to tell it the beat, you don't have to tell it the time signature or the key signature. It figures it out. You can do rubato, triplets, legato, staccato, whatever. Most likely, the finished score will need very little hand editing.

The programming talent behind this kind of artificial intelligence is truly amazing. I'm not kidding. This is way the hell out there super-geek class computer programming.

Chuck(G) · Post by **Chuck(G)** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 9:39 pm

The folks at Sibelius seem to listen to the customers. For a couple of years, I grumbled publicly about not being able to save scores in down-level form (i.e. Sibelius 2 when I'm using Sibelius 4). They listened.

I'm impressed.

BVD Press · Post by **BVD Press** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 10:11 pm

For all of the Sibelius users on the Forum, here are two things in Sibelius I have been unable to do and tech support had no answers for:

1. Write a chord as "C7". Not C with a 7 above. Just like you type "C7". Last I checked with tech support it was impossible. You can type it in as text, but not with the chord feature which allow transpositions. That one wasa fun one to explain to client who wanted the project in both Finale and Sibelius.

2. If you have a key change and a left repeat sign (||:) in the same measure, the key change appears after the repeat sign. The reapeat sign can be moved manually, but not defaulted there.

Just my humble opinion, but Sibelius just does not offer the flkexibility Finale offers. Finale is more difficult to learn, but I appreciate the flexibility it offers me.

__

With everything being said, they are both very good programs. I always tell people attempting to decide between the two to download both demos and see which works best for what they do. I don't use sound for either program, but some do. Some people do not need the notation part, but some do. For what I do, unless someone submits a file 99% of the time a client does not care what progam I use. They only care how it looks on paper.

Anyway, any help for the above would be appreciated. I am sure someone out there is much better with Sibelius than I.

If you happen to have a Finale question, please ask away.

BTW, NotePad does suck. It works fine, but does not offer the features the full Finale version offers. Not even close.

Chuck(G) · Post by **Chuck(G)** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 11:31 pm

BVD Press wrote:1. Write a chord as "C7". Not C with a 7 above. Just like you type "C7". Last I checked with tech support it was impossible. You can type it in as text, but not with the chord feature which allow transpositions. That one wasa fun one to explain to client who wanted the project in both Finale and Sibelius.

A piece of soup. Just go to House Style->Edit Text Style->Chord Symbols and change the font to a standard one instead of Opus or Inkpen chords. The 7 will be displayed as normal size text.

Your No. 2 is a minor annoyance, but I'll do some researching and see if it can be automatically done.

Leland · Post by **Leland** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 4:29 am

SplatterTone wrote:The comments I hear suggest that Finale lets you do more.
NOTE: YOU do.
Not the program do, YOU do.

If you want the program itself to exhibit a little intelligence. Well, it will. A little. Very little. Very, very ... VERY little.

Right. I mean, there are plenty of things that it should know to do already, but it just plain doesn't.

One of the simplest, stupidest examples is when I copy the composer/arranger info from one music sheet to another. In the first document, it's justified to the left and aligned according to the top & right margins. I'll select its text, press Copy, then go to the second sheet, double-click where I want it, and then Paste. Then I have to tell it all over again to justify to the left (could it please do that much on its own?) and to do the alignment again.

I have to copy-paste because I can't drag & drop from one to the other. And this is on a Mac, where drag & drop has been the norm for two decades.

AND, I have to re-align such text items on extracted parts because Finale is too stupid to understand that the corners on an 11 x 17 landscape format are farther apart than on 8-1/2 x 14 portrait. If I'm lucky, the arranger info made it onto the extracted part, but it'll be sitting there almost a full page width away, far from any piece of paper, waiting like a bronzed dog to be told where to go.

BVD Press · Post by **BVD Press** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 8:07 am

Chuck(G) wrote:
A piece of soup. Just go to House Style->Edit Text Style->Chord Symbols and change the font to a standard one instead of Opus or Inkpen chords. The 7 will be displayed as normal size text.

Does it look like this "C7" or is the 7 slightly above the "C". I will check it out. If it does work, it is a major improvement over the last time I did a Jazz project.

As for the minor annoyance. Yes it is minor, but also a royal pain to remember if you do a lot pieces with this issue. The biggest issue I have with this is that is notationally incorrect. That is not to say Finale does everything correctly either!

BVD Press · Post by **BVD Press** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 10:33 am

Leland wrote: 1. Tne of the simplest, stupidest examples is when I copy the composer/arranger info from one music sheet to another. In the first document, it's justified to the left and aligned according to the top & right margins. I'll select its text, press Copy, then go to the second sheet, double-click where I want it, and then Paste. Then I have to tell it all over again to justify to the left (could it please do that much on its own?) and to do the alignment again.

2. have to copy-paste because I can't drag & drop from one to the other. And this is on a Mac, where drag & drop has been the norm for two decades.

3. AND, I have to re-align such text items on extracted parts because Finale is too stupid to understand that the corners on an 11 x 17 landscape format are farther apart than on 8-1/2 x 14 portrait. If I'm lucky, the arranger info made it onto the extracted part, but it'll be sitting there almost a full page width away, far from any piece of paper, waiting like a bronzed dog to be told where to go.

I will take these one at a time:

1. You are copying text and not the justification of the text. Why not just duplicate the file and work from there? If you are using "Word" and copy text that is justified to the center of the page and then paste into another file the text does not center justify. I am not sure Finale is unlike any program in this instance.

2. Music and everything associated with each note can be dragged and dropped, but not text. Maybe they need to improve this!

3. I am not sure what you are saying here. I make scores and extract parts all day long and do not have these issues. 11x17, 8.5x11, landscape, portrait, etc. Maybe try justifying to margin or page. A change my solve your problem.

I can't believe I am actually trying to defend Finale. You should see my posts on the Finale forum. They are the complete opposite of what I post here!

If you the file for #3, please send it along and I will see what I can do to help. Finale is far (vary far) from perfect, but once you get a template going it is quite easy to work with. If you happen to be bored, you can see 449 samples I have done for Cimarron on the website below. All done on Finale.