On Jul 8, 2005, at 11:07 AM, John Howell wrote:
Time and knowledge base indeed. I'm one of those people who are sick of tweaking, and would like for the default settings to be at least <close> to usable. I'm working on a book of pieces for flute and piano for my students, and I find that I'm having to do a lot of tweaking to get things to look right: 1. Virtually <every> slur has to be tweaked. If I change the music spacing I can pretty much count on slurs going haywire, being drawn at an ungodly height, for instance, and colliding with all manner of notational elements--ties, accidentals, expressions, etc. But even when I let Finale do the spacing, slurs still get drawn at ungodly heights. Transposing the music makes slurs go nuts too. 2. Same with tuplets. I thought these had been improved, but when I do a simple group of quarter triplets, using Speedy note entry, the bracket is almost never the right height, requiring more tweaking. Then if I transpose the part, I have to tweak tuplets all over again. 3. Where is the freaking Maestro Default file, and how do I tweak <that> so that I don't get a one-inch left margin on a file created from the Setup Wizard? I thought I'd located it in the Components folder, so I tweaked the page layout settings for both score and parts to get rid of the one-inch left margin. Then, lo and behold, the next time I used the Setup Wizard I still got one-inch left margins. I have templates made for a lot of situations, but not <every> situation, so I need to use the Setup Wizard occasionally, as I suspect most <average> users do. Why is it such a mystery where this default file is located, and why is it so hard to preset things the way I want in Finale? Wouldn't House Styles eliminate this problem? 4. I spent a lot of time creating an extensive instrument list, called Lon's Orchestra, that covers just about every instrument I'll ever need to use in Finale. I got tired of having to load my instrument library into every file created with the Setup Wizard, so while I was tweaking page layout settings, I also loaded my instrument list into this supposed Maestro Default file. That didn't work either. The next time I used the Setup Wizard my instrument list was not there. These are the types of complains I've heard from people who have tried Finale in the past, but moved on to some other notation program, usually Sibelius. I tried looking in the manual for answers to the above stated problems, but gave up in frustration, because I guess I just don't know where to look--and that's after looking in the Table of Contents and the Index. If I don't know exactly how something is worded, I can't find it in the manual. I remember having to ask you guys when I first bought Finale how to beam across staves, because I couldn't find it in the manual. I didn't know that it was called "cross-staff beaming." (I just tried looking in Finale QuickHelp for "beaming across staves," and was directed to the Mass Mover tool.) BTW, I ordered the $199 "cross-grade" of Sibelius last night, and, yes, I've already preordered Finale 2006, so I'm not necessarily jumping ship, but I'm close. These issues have been bugging me for the entire five + years that I've been using Finale. Lon ******************************************** Lon Price, Los Angeles |
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