I've been reading with interest the discussion of staff lists in Finale 2009, and I agree with Robert that the artifical limit of 4 staff lists should be eliminated. Users should be able to create as many - or few - staff lists as there are staff list-enabled expression categories.
The main advantage of staff lists over drag-apply is that you can use them to display expressions differently in the score than in individual parts. Certain text (like tempo markings) that should appear in every part usually only needs to vertically appear once (or very few times) in the score. Staff lists work great for situations like this. Here's an example I read about: let's say you want to put a "Repeat Til Cue" marking in the last measure of a short repeated section. You want it to appear correctly in the score and in parts that are playing, but you don't want it to break the multimeasure rest in parts that are resting. You could enter it in the last measure and use a staff list to only show it on the playing parts and score, and then enter it again in the first measure and use a different staff list to only show it in the resting parts so it won't break the multimeasure rests. Now, let's say you have several sections like this in a piece, and a different group of instruments are playing/resting each time. You can see how the four staff list limit would be a problem. In my opinion, the biggest problem with staff lists in Finale 2009 is the inability to name them, followed closely by having the artifical limit of four staff lists - no matter how many or how few staff list-enabled categories you have. Another minor annoyance is the fact that clicking to the left of a staff name in the Staff List dialog no longer checks both score and parts; you have to manually mouse over and check both boxes. Thank goodness there are still no staff list limits for text entered using the Repeat tool. What's up with that? Brian Williams _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
