On Aug 7, 2007, at 8:58 PM, Raymond Horton wrote:
Has anyone tried the new Merge function in 2008? I've been playing
with it a bit with mixed success. I tried it one a large work with
some differences in instrumetation between movements, and I'm not
sure just what to answer with the questions that come up regrading
staves in one file that aren't in another.
I also tried to combine several organ pieces onto one file for a
collection, but the function got fouled up because not all my
organ works/files used the same midi channels. I ended up with
multiple staves containing music on different staves in different
works. I could probably Mass Mover, uh, I mean Selection Tool, the
music all up to the same staves, since that tool copies everything
better than the old Mass Mover tool did, and then delete the unused
staves. If I were more consistent (using the same channel setup
for all my organ pieces, I would not have had this problem.
Anyway, it looks like it will works better than old cut-and-paste
ways of combining several movements into one file, once I figure
out what options to use.
The merge function also claims to combine single parts into one
score, but I haven't tried that yet.
Ray,
I tested this out with a couple of my scores and some parts, and it
works very well, from what I can tell.
It WILL give you new staves if the staff names don't match exactly,
but it is very easy to optimise out the unused ones, or as you say,
copy to other staves. Otherwise, what would you expect it to do with
unmatching instrumentation from one piece to another? You can adjust
that as you go, too, as the merge dialogue box seemed very intuitive
to me.
The parts combining worked, as far as I can tell, transparently. The
only thing I needed to do was adjust my staff lists for expressions,
but I think the original was messed up, so it probably isn't Finale's
fault.
Robert Piechaud (did I get his name right?) deserves a big round of
applause for this one. LIke Tobias Geisen and Robert Patterson, he
really seems to get it right the first time, like he did for Human
Playback (a HUGE accomplishment as well!)
I wonder whether having one person attack a problem like this is what
makes the solution so elegant? Some other new features of Finale have
not been anywhere near as complete or easy to use.
Christopher
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