[all the below is about WinFin2K3] A while back I wrote that I had a piece where tempo tool alterations were not being honored and couldn't figure out why. I'm back working on the piece this weekend and on the theory that the problem was something inherited from an ancient default template, decided to try pasting the document into a newly created blank document.
That's where the confusion started. First off, why is copying so incredibly complicated? I don't see any way at all to copy from one document to another that will copy: 1. all notes and expressions/articulations 2. all smart shapes (measure- or note-attached) 3. all clef changes 4. tempo tool alterations Am I missing something? Indeed, I see no way at all to force copying of clef changes. Well, anyway, after having done this, the layout was messed up, but I was really only interested in seeing if I could get the tempo tool alterations to play back. So, I went in and recreated the tempo alterations for a measure with a fermata. Lo and behold, it played back. Of course, it was the wrong instruments, but that was OK. So, I went to the real file and saved the instruments as a library and loaded it into the freshly created file. And then, no playback. Aha! Something in the instrument library caused it to stop playing back tempo tool changes. So, I futzed around with the instruments for a while, but didn't accomplish anything, so I decided to load the default GM library. That got me back playback of my tempo tool alterations (though, amusingly, with all the instruments playing back as Acoustic Bass!), so I just altered the library to have the right instruments, saved it, and loaded it back into my original file. Eureka! The playback now works! Of course, now I return to the state of confusion, and that's the way the tempo tool settings interact with the definition of BEAT in a piece. The meter of this piece is 3/8, but since I wanted 3 8ths beamed together, I'd defined it as one dotted quarter to the measure (I could rant about the fact that default metrical beaming is still hopelessly wrong, even with Classic 8ths, but that would be a digression from the present confusion). So, I would assume that tempo would be defined as 1 beat to the measure, with the first 8th being beat 1, the second, beat 1.333 and the third, 1.667. But, no, it turns out that the tempo tool thinks the beat is the 8th note. This is actually easier to deal with (since my tempo was actually defined on the 8th note, not on the measure), but seems to me to be in conflict with my understand of how the time signature tool works. I can work around this, but the whole way in which meters are defined and how that relates to beaming is really problematic. And I still don't know exactly what specifically in the instrument library was causing tempo tool alterations to be ignored. But I do know now what to do when I encounter this problem -- an elaborate workaround to fix things that, apparently, I have no direct user interface for manipulating. This is also one of the consequences of a non-cascadig template-based structure. I've been using the same piano quartet template for a long time, since it has whole bunches of things in it specific to my work. I don't even use a template, I just take an existing file and save it under a new name, clear out the old data and start afresh. This means that may of these files started life as WinFin 2.01 and WinFin 3.52 files. It's just way too difficult to manage these things with files that are not connected to their parent templates (i.e., that have only the contents they were born with). The whole method of loading libraries is too problematic. In the current context, I tried loading the full library of document settings that are in my WinFin2K3 Maestro Wide default template, but when I did that and respaced, the result was completely disastrous. Again, I'm sure there was something lurking in the file that dates back to WinFin 3.52 days or some such that was causing the spacing to come out wrong. I'm about to give up on Finale. Too many things are just completely broken in it, and too hard to figure out. And I've been using it regularly since 1990, so I'm not by any means a novice. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
