On 23 May 2005 at 14:32, Robert Patterson wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > > Finale's copying between files is a complete mess. > > This statement strikes me as hyperbole, but certainly there are some > serious flaws. The consensus is correct that there is no functional > difference between Copy/Insert and clip files. They both produce the > same results (and same errors). > > The worst errors are: > > 1. Clef changes on barlines are not copied. However, because > mid-measure clef changes *are* copied, the result is liable to be a > mess if there are any clef changes. > > 2. Measure-attached text blocks are not copied. > > 3. Pre-Fin05, meas-attached expressions are usually made into a big > fat mess. Starting with Fin05, they copy as you would most likely > expect them to. > > 4. At least in Fin05, copyable staff styles are copied to arbitrary > regions that may or may not overlap with the measures they are > supposed to be assigned to.
This is also the case in WinFin2K3. It's easier to remove all staff styles and re-apply, as there's no rhyme or reason for where they show up in the target. > Provided you are using at least Fin03, items 1, 2, and 3 are easily > addressed with my Mass Copy plugin. (Visit its user pages at my > website. At the bottom there are some specific instructions for > concatenating files.) Your plugin really helped me for the clefs. As I hardly ever use text blocks and have only one measure-attached expression per movement, that was no hardship. But the clefs thing is very annoying to correct manually, as you very quickly encounter the bug with measures that formerly had a mid- measure clef ending up entirely unclickable. The one thing I wish your plugin would copy is cautionary accidentals. In most files these copy OK, but it depends on which version the files were created in -- one of my pieces lost all the cautionary accidentals in the copy process. > The best suggestion I have for resolving 4 is to look at every page > with the Staff Tool selected and Show Staff Styles (and Staff Style > Names) turned on. It then is fairly obvious what, if anything, needs > to be fixed. I used a lot of blank notation in my old files, and it all got wrongly imported into the new files. I just cleared all staff styles and re-applied them to the correct locations, which were obvious because of multiple layers on top of one another. I also wanted to convert to my new method of implementing performance of trills and such, so I eliminated a lot of the blank notation, in any case (for instance, for appoggiaturas, I now change the Start/End times instead of realizing the correct performance, so the blank notation is no longer needed in those cases). > I just completed a huge project that involved concatenating five score > movements into single part files for some 40 parts. While there was > the usual litany of problems, it was by no means a "complete mess". On > the contrary, it went relatively smoothly. It did opt not to > concatenate the percussion parts due to problem #4. My perc parts made > extensive use of staff styles, and I did not want to have to fight > through all those problems. Well, if your files were created in a recent version of Finale, or based on recent templates, you probably had no problems. But I've been combining files, some of which date back through templates to Finale 2.01, and those were a mess. There's also corruption of data, as I described in the case of the improperly transposed violin part. But that may have been caused by a problem in the source file. Actually, just checking on that one, it turns out the problem was caused by INDEPENDENT KEY SIGNATURES. I hadn't realized that I'd used independent key sigs in the source file. Can anyone test to see if in Finale 05, where the problems with music spacing of independent time signatures has been fixed, if this problem with copying independent key signatures has been rectified. As to hyperbole or not, the number of problems is huge, and the ones I've outlined are only the ones I've *discovered*. It may be that there are others that I haven't noticed, despite intensive proofing. The number of issues is so huge that it seems to me to be a major set of issues and shows that copying between documents is fundamentally unreliable. -- 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
