Thanks for explaining that, Chris - I was thinking the problems were as
a result of non-matching midi channels, not so much non-matching staff
names.
I had tried to merge a couple of single part files that had been already
been extracted from larger scores and the merge function balked
(actually it said "special part extraction is turned on on one of the
files." - I don't recall seeing special part extraction in years and
couldn't find it to turn it off, so I assumed the problem was the the
parts had been extracted from larger files. Any ideas on that one? I
suppose staff names might be a consideration there, also.
RBH
Christopher Smith wrote:
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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