Robert is certainly spot-on in his comments, and please allow me to add a few points from the playback and miscellaneous areas. *Finalescript 2.0 is better than ever. If you are not an FS user, you ought to be, since it can automate a large number of nuisance repetitive activities. Older versions of FS seemed to be an afterthought, but the 2.0 is well-documented and well-executed. Even if you're convinced you'll never use FS, just do me a favor and check it out!! I use it--among other uses--to make quick transformations between treble euphonium, bass clef euphonium, F Horn, and concert treble parts that I and others use interchangeably. *ASIO Support...this brings Finale into compatibility with modern audio setups on most machines. It lowers latency and reduces sputtering and gagging at playback. If you don't have an ASIO driver on your machine, consider ASIO4ALL (though it can be temperamental) *UNIVERSAL VST Support--you are no longer tethered to Native Instruments VSTs!! Load up any VST library and play away. There's a nice VST manager as well, so it's easy to tell Finale where your VSTs are, thus avoiding needless duplication of DLLs *ARIA player. Very user-friendly and nice sounds from Garritan. WHAT DO I MISS??? That's easy...ABILITY TO RUN PLUGINS ON LINKED PARTS!! For those who inquired about our status after the flood hit, THANKS!! We are recovering slowly but surely...we didn't get hit as bad as some, but we are having to redo our basement, in which we used to spend a lot of time. Jim
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Robert Patterson Sent: Fri 25-Jul-08 9:51 To: Finale Subject: [Finale] Some comments re Fin09 Since Fin09 is making appearances in the wild now, I feel there is no longer any reason not to comment on some of its new features. There are only three items in the upgrade that are of primary interest or concern to a user like me, who is focused entirely on notation and ease-of-use and doesn't care much about playback. 1. They have mitigated problems with engraver slurs. I have not played with this enough to comment on whether they have fully eliminated the problems, but any progress here is to the good. 2. They now allow editing of multiple (consecutive) pages at once in a single window. With today's gigantic flat panels and powerful processors to drive them, it is a huge bonus. 3. They have reinvented Expressions. It is this final feature that I am most familiar with, so I will comment the most about it. The most important thing you need to know as an existing Finale user is NOTE-ATTACHED EXPRESSIONS HAVE BEEN REMOVED. Let that sink in for a minute. Catch your breath. And begin to think of the ramifications. Then before you begin to scream, read on. Instead of note-attached expressions we now have beat-attached expressions. "We always have had beat-attached expressions," you might say. And you would be right if by "always" you mean since v3.0, c. 1994. But these beat-attached expressions are different. They can sense a note that is at that beat and react to it, tracking it movements with the Note Mover, and autopositioning vertically based on the same entry-oriented settings that used to be there for note-attached. This seems really plausible until you start thinking about layers, grace notes, v1/v2, and even tuplets of 0-length. All of these mean that an unlimited number of notes can coincide at the same beat location. Here is one of the really good new things: MM has eliminated the need for all those assignment dialogs. Now you select an expression from the dialog, and it knows how to assign itself. But if you are in the situation of multiple notes coinciding on the beat, you have to open the assignment dialog. There you will find options to select Layer and which (if any) grace note to track. You will NOT find support for separately tracking V1 or V2. I don't see this as a problem for new files, but it could be for existing files. I have adopted "note-oriented" as my term for these new beat-attached items that have replaced note-attached items. If you assign a note-oriented item to a meaure that has no notes, it behaves just like an old-fashioned beat-attached (meas-attached) expression. Here is the next really good thing. Expressions can now be placed in categories, and every expression in that category can have the same settings. There are (I believe) seven base categories with different settings options, and you can clone those for as many categories as you would like. You can also filter by category (or not) when you select from the dialog to assign one. Now, about those Staff Lists. MM made a mess of Staff Lists with a copying bug they introduced in Fin08, and (apparently) to punish us for their mistake, they have limited us to exactly 4 Staff Lists in Fin09, no more, no less. That's usually about all I need: All Staves, Top Staff, Bottom Staff, and Tempo Staves. I'm not sure if one can change the names of the 4 to be those names. If not, you are stuck with whatever arbitrary names they come with. If you need more Staff Lists than that you are out of luck. (I consider to this to be an egregious artificial limit, and I would encourage other Fin09 user who thinks so to let MM know as well.) Staff Lists are no longer part of the expression assignment. They are now an option on (some) Categories. If the Category has a staff list, it is assigned that way. This change makes a great deal of sense to me. The new UI is very sexy, with the dotted line showing an expression's assignment. I vehemently dislike that dragging an expression causes its assignment to change, but fortunately there is a shift-key override. They've also added the drag-enclose metatool assignment method, both horizontally and vertically, much like we've had for Articulations for years. Nice. So what are the downsides? The downsides are mainly to do with importing existing files into Fin09. Remember that "beat-attached" expressions are actually meas-attached expressions with a beat (i.e., EDU) offset in the measure. There are certain things that meas-attached expression don't do. 1. Expressions that were attached to invisible notes (and hence invisible) become visible when imported into Fin09. 2. Expressions that were mirrored before Fin09 are converted into separate meas-attached assignments that are no longer mirrored. (I haven't actually tested this, but I believe it to be true.) 3. Expressions separately attached to V1 and V2 notes on the same beat will almost certainly have to be re-positioned. Even single expressions in this situation are likely to require re-positioning. 4. Other more obscure issues that you may see if you use my Beam Over Barline plugin and there are expressions attached to the notes in the beam. And on that note, the full version of my Beam Over Barline plugin will soon be receiving an update that allows you to automatically compensate for some of these conversion issues (if they were caused by a beam over a barline). Unfortunately there was not time for the Lite version to make it into the Fin09 release. -- Robert Patterson http://RobertGPatterson.com <http://robertgpatterson.com/> _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
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