The recent discussion about whether to combine movements or separate got me thinking on how I was going to prepare parts for my large body of piano quartet and quintet files (e.g., my research over the past 14 years). I started out in WinFin2.01 in 1991, and back then, there was no possibility of having 3 and 4 movements of a piano quartet in one file. I've since continued the same setup.
Well, it's getting time that I'm about to start preparing parts for playing the damned things, and yesterday afternoon I experimented with using clip files to assemble the parts. It was a nightmare. What I did was first extract the string parts for all three movements, then create the complete violin part by using clip files to import the extracted violin parts for movements 2 and 3. Then I formated the whole part. I then saved the violin part as a new file (for the viola) and cleared all the data and broke up the multi-measure rests. I think created clip files from the three extracted viola parts, and copied them into this new blank viola part (which inherited the layout of the violin part). I then reformatted that. I repeated this part for the cello. Again, it was nightmarishly difficult. Granted, it took me a while to figure out that I really had to clear the measures and break the multi-measure rests before pasting the clip files over top of the existing measures (I've never quite understood the logic behind empty measures pasting over measures with notes in them leaving the target notes alone -- I've yet to figure out a normal situation in which there'd be any benefit to this behavior: I've just grown accustomed to it). Once that was all solved, things were much easier. But there were other kinds of weird problems. In one case I ended up with a bunch of phantom layer 2 notes from a completely different movement (they were in a different meter). In another case, I had measures that wouldn't respace properly (indeed, throughout, I had major problems with the widths of multi-measure rests and empty measures, which uniformly would end up too wide, regardless of my settings for minimum width). And worst of all was the clef change problem -- I thought I was being clever before creating the clip files by instead of just checking COPY EVERYTHING I instead went into COPY MEASURE ITEMS and COPY ENTRY ITEMS and setting both to ALL, but still, many clef changes were missed. This in turn got me into to the old situation where after re- implementing multiple clef changes throughout a part, you eventually come to a measure where you need a mid-measure clef change, and the clef tool won't activate. In the past I've always been able to insert a new measure, copy the problem measure's notes into and then the thing would work, but in one case, it wouldn't work at all. in the end, I re-copied the passage to a clip file and re-inserted it, and then was able to implement the proper clef changes. So, today, I thought that perhaps I was foolish not to simply combine the scores into one file and to then extract from that. Well, the problems are multiplied, especially with regard to lost clef changes. This is WinFin 2K3, so it's not because I'm using an old version of Finale. The files I'm working with are based on old templates (maybe as old as WinFin 3.52), but I don't quite understand why that should be an issue. How *should* I be doing this? I shudder to think how many weeks of work it will take me if it never gets any better than this, since I have literally dozens of complete works with 3 and 4 movements to assemble either at the score level or at the part level. And it seems to me that the MEASURE tool in page view is *extremely* slow. I can't imagine how slow reformatting the latter movements is going to be, given how slow it got just working with single-line extracted parts. Any and all advice greatly appreciated! -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
