finale 2006b hell



I suppose it says a lot that the main things I complain about with regard to the notation program Finale these days involve audio playback. It's a notation program first and foremost, and while I do have some things I'd love to see in terms of improvements along that line, none of these are show stoppers. I was able to use FInale to notate a bunch of scores back in the early 90's starting with Finale 3.2, so it's only gotten better in that regard.

However, Finale now also touts itself as having great human playback ability. Indeed, playback using the included Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds were among the most highly touted new features of F2006. I've been able to get some things done with Finale and audio, either using its included soundfont or the GPO sounds. However, it's usually a struggle, and last night was no different. I'm currently working on a long string quartet for Glenn Freeman, and added in a section where I basically thought of the quartet as a percussion ensemble. Perhaps I've been listening too much to Cage's works for prepared piano these days, but it struck me that we don't think of string instruments as anything but melodic. I figured, why not push the envelope a bit, so I put in a long rhythmic (and very difficult) section with the strings playing exclusively col legno battuto (using the wood of the bow to strike the strings).

The only way I have of mimicking the sound is using a pizzicato sound patch, and I mapped the col legno marking to cause a patch change to MIDI patch #46, which is pizzicato (per the General MIDI specification). Worked great on everything but the first violin. So I went ahead and changed the col legno marking to pizzicato, which is recognized automatically by Finale during human playback to create a pizzicato sound. Again, the first violin wouldn't do it. In fact, the first violin suddenly wouldn't change sounds at all. Worse, the pizzicato notes at the beginning of the piece are now all played normally (arco) in violin 1, which is wrong.

I posted the file on the Finale Forum, and it was replicated by a user who was able to remove the problem by pasting my notes into a Finale for Windows document. So it's a Mac-only issue, and something seems very wrong with the file for no clear reason. I'm frustrated---it shouldn't be this much of a problem, and I shouldn't have to be up until 3 AM messing with this stuff to no avail. Early this morning, to add insult to injury, the patch change worked fine on its own, but as soon as I scrolled back to the opening measures, the violin was frozen into only playing arco, not pizzicato. Must be the karma.

I was able to dump it into Reason 3.0.4, and can hear the col legno section just fine in all instruments. But Reason has its limitations; no tempo changes on the fly, no patch changes (at least not as far as I can see), and while I've played with Tracktion, I haven't figured it out enough to really do much with it successfully, and am hesitant to do more than play with the demo version for now.

Music playback shouldn't be this difficult. Or frustrating. It's hard enough writing the notes to begin with.

Posted: Thu - December 29, 2005 at 04:23 PM          

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