At 02:57 PM 07/31/2005, Darcy James Argue wrote: >In Finale 2006, you do NOT have to make an additional version of the >score for soundfont playback. Provided you use the Setup Wizard to >create your score (or manually set up the score correctly), the EXACT >SAME VERSION OF THE SCORE will play back just fine using *either* HP >plus either the Finale Soundfont *or* HP plus GPO. You do NOT need two >different versions of the file.
Ahhh.....another *extremely* important and confusing thing that doesn't appear to be in the manual: You can assign a different slot to an instrument in GPO than the MIDI channel number. This, for me, was the missing link, and it explains how you can have percussion play back on MIDI channel 10 when that slot is not available in Finale GPO.
You can see this if you set up a new GPO score with flute, violin, and percussion. Check the instrument list; as expected, flute is channel 1, perc is channel 10, and violin is channel 3. Now look at GPO setup. The instruments are in slots 1-3, but if you select slot 2 (percussion), you'll see underneath that it's set to pick up on MIDI channel 10.
Darcy, this for me is a *very* important insight, even if it's something that was obvious to you. Going back and rereading the manual, I see that this point is, in fact, in there, but I don't think it's well written, and I missed it the first time around.
Now, this leads me to to another feature which I think would be very useful. I don't have a very powerful machine, and I'm not going to be using GPO in the near future. But I would like to set up my new scores for GPO playback from the start. The problem is that actual instrument loading takes place at the *wrong* point in the process. In the setup wizard, it takes place when you finish the wizard. If you're configuring GPO by hand, it takes place as you add each instrument.
I think instrument loading shouldn't take place until you click the "Play through VST" option. This would let me set up a score with GPO either by hand or through the wizard but *not* actually load any instruments until I wanted to use them. For example, if I'm setting up a big orchestra score, I don't have enough RAM to load all the samples. But I still want to configure my score right now, so that when I upgrade my machine, all I have to do is say "Play through VST". Right now, Finale tries to load all the instruments at the beginning, which is just a waste of time.
Aaron. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
