I've been laboring for many months working on an enormous opera composed by a client, based on Shakespeare's 12th Night. This project started out maybe 4 years ago, back in Finale 2001 or 2002, I can't remember. I decided early on to break the file into sub-files due to its potential size. Act I is about 1676 measures and Act II is 1637 measures, give or take. The client now has firm performance dates and this project is rumbling forward. For the sake of sanity, I determined that 10 sub-files was asinine when it would eventually come to part extraction, so last April I assembled the files of Act I into one single file, which comes in at around 3.1 mb, in Finale 2003.
I am on a Mac, a MD dual 1.25ghz G4, running OS 9.2.2, Finale 2003a. 1.5 gigs of RAM installed and about 85 megs dedicated to Finale. I have no real intention of trying to move this project into 2004 and OS X. To me, that's just asking for trouble at this point. Working with this large file has been extremely frustrating, due to the overall slowness the Finale exhibits when doing many of the edits. A few examples: Today, I tried to delete one measure, at m133 in the first act, using the Measure Tool delete command. It took Finale over 11 minutes to complete the edit. Then an immediate save took nearly 3 minutes. Subsequent saves take about 45 seconds. Saving a backup copy in Finale is off. Using Page Layout, and moving one system up on a page about an inch, took over 4 minutes to complete. All systems are optimized and the overall layout is pretty much completed. I also tried to join about 5 measures from two systems into one with TGTools Join Systems plugin, and after 18 minutes of watching the spinning 8th note, I ran out of patience and force quit Finale and restarted. When I came back and joined the measures together with Mass Edit, Finale tool about 2 1/2 minutes to complete the edit. I have run Data Check to remove deleted items and also verified the file integrity, and seemingly, all is well as far as Finale is concerned. So my questions to the masses here are: When does a file ever become too big for Finale to handle? Or does it ever become too big? Are these times outrageous or is my impatience showing? I haven't tried extracting any parts, but I'm assuming this could take an eternity. Does anyone have any experience with Finale on files this size? I thought I'd pose these questions here before running them by Coda. Any thoughts? *************************** J.D. Thomas ThomaStudios West Linn OR http://www.thomastudios.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] *************************** Top sign an SUV is too damn big: It has its own Congressman _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
