Man, oh man, what have I wrought?
Score expressions multiplying like tribbles! I don't know if it's Finale, TGTools, or the score I'm starting with. Oy!
For starters, here's my vanilla setup: FinMac 2005a, PowerMac G4/466, 512 MB RAM, Mac OS 10.3.6, plenty of HD space, blah, blah.
The short of it: when Smart Exploding combined wind parts with TGTools (extracted from score), a zillion score expressions are added. It's an awful mess.
OK, so here's what I did.
1) I start with a full orchestra score, about 100 measures long, put together by a relative novice on c. FinWin 2001. The composer never used staff expressions, only score expressions with "This staff only" checked.
2) I extract the string parts and they look fine. I edit them. No problem.
3) I extract the wind and percussion parts (Finale was running since I did the above yesterday). They look fine. I keep the score and all parts open, for editing purposes.
4) I open a wind part, which has both first and second parts on it, and apply TGTools' Smart Explosion of Multi-part Staves. My Mac goes wack-o. It hogs up to 95% of the processor and takes about 15 minutes to process (spinning beach ball and all). When it finally finishes thinking, the original wind part and the two news staves below are overwhelmed by miscellaneous score expressions that were not in the original wind part I was working on, but from other parts further down the score.
5) I tried this on a couple of other parts. Same thing.
6) I close all open documents, re-extract a wind part, apply TGTools, and same problem.
7) I quit Finale, then start up and open a newly-extracted wind part. Apply TGTools. Same problem.
Like I said, the expressions were all "This staff only", so I don't know how they invaded other staves. Also, like I said, the composer is a novice. He also did his original work on an old PC.
Abiding by the wisdom of the list, I had autosave on, though I can't say that affected anything. Between restarting Finale and applying TGTools, enough time hadn't gone by for Autosave to kick in.
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I may be able to complete my work with this score without resolving this mess (not by fixing the present score, but by correcting his original parts with pen and ink). A longterm solution would require solving this problem, but since I offered to do this gratis (the composer is a friend and I offered to help to clean up his parts, for the sake of my orchestra players), I'm going to take the easy out.
But if it's a Finale problem, we have to get to the bottom of it.
Oy.
Andrew Levin
PS - I just got my computer back! I told TGTools to "Go" on the latest operation, then wrote this entire email, then it just finished exploding part. It feels like I'm working on my old Mac IIsi.
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