On 05 Jun 2004, at 03:22 PM, Christopher BJ Smith wrote:
Chromatic Transposition (for transposing instruments without key signatures) was an excellent and badly-needed innovation, but it didn't treat accidentals properly for a couple of versions,
A couple of versions? It's STILL not fixed! When you select "respell notes," Finale (STILL!) applies the respell to the concert pitches, not the transposed pitches. For example, let's say you have a chromatically transposing Bb Trumpet part that goes G-F#-F-D-C#-C, and you want it respelled G-Gb-F-D-Db-C. You select the measure, choose "Favor Flats" and then "Respell Notes." Nothing happens. This is true when working in a score with "View in Concert Pitch" turned off as well as when working with the extracted part.
Why? Because Finale (STILL!) thinks that F# and C# are "really" E nat. and B nat. and treats them as such. So, when you apply "Respell Notes," Finale applies the operation to the concert pitch notes, favoring flats -- i.e., F-E-Eb-C-B-Bb. Chromatic Transposition doesn't actually perform a true transposition of the concert pitches. It's just a quick and dirty "display pitches a major second up" algorithm, which obviously causes problems when you try to apply the "Respell Notes" operation to a chromatically transposing part.
The one thing they did recently sort of fix was the Cautionary Accidentals plugin. It no longer applies extraneous courtesy naturals to every single F nat. and C nat. in, say, a Tenor Sax part (because Finale thinks those notes are "really" Eb and Bb). But that wasn't even Coda's doing -- they simply adopted Tobias's "Cautionary Accidentals TG" plugin, which was written to take transposing instruments into account. There are still problems with even Tobias's version though -- for instance, the "Courtesy Accidentals" option, useful in highly chromatic music where you want every sharp or flat signed, doesn't work correctly with transposing instruments.
and STILL doesn't transpose chord symbols correctly.
This is just another instance of the same problem -- Chromatic Transposition isn't really transposition at all, it's just a kludge for display.
One solution is to manually transpose the staves instead of using Staff Attributes or Staff Sytles. But this has several drawbacks -- it screws up playback when using a transposed score. It ruins the usefulness of using Staff Styles for doubling instruments. It makes it impossible to easily switch back and forth between viewing in concert pitch and viewing the transposed pitches. In other words, the cure is worse than the disease.
- Darcy
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn NY
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