[JWplugins] New accidental setting

Mon Mar 18 21:12:59 CET 2013

Hey Jari, 
This is musician Steve Vai, 
I've been using Finale since it came out in 1988. It sure has changed, thank God. 
I use it in spurts and only recently switched from writing music by hand to writing it into Finale instead of handing it off to a copyist. 
I'm working on several huge scores right now and oddly enough it wasn't until recently that I discovered your plug in sets. 
Thank you deeply. Too little credit goes to people who can do things as vital for a community. When I discovered your "Staff Polyphony" plugin and started to use it, tears of joy rolled down my cheeks... well, sort of. Congratulations. 

I don't know if any of the below exists already. And please keep in mind I know virtually nothing about programming, but below are some thoughts I wanted to share in regards to plug-ins that would be useful to someone like me. As mentioned, they may exist inside or outside of Finale, I just have not discovered them yet. 

1. Consolidate Rests: Many times when importing midi etc., you are left with too many rests that should be consolidated within a proper beat or bar. 
For instance, I might end up with an 8th note and (2) 16th rests in one beat. Usually I have to go in by hand and tweak. I tried using Finales TG tools "Modify Rests" but it doesn't really do the trick. The above example is a simplification. After various cut and pastes or midi imports I can be left with many bars of impractical rests sprinkled across the pages in many staves. I would like to highlight the entire score or particular region, or partial region, and have all the rests consolidated. Do you have anything that can do this?

2. Wreck remover: I'm looking for a plug in that can un-colide all elements such as dynamics, expressions, articulations etc. Staves can get complex and messy and fitting everything in without colliding things always ends up being a lot of manual time. It would be great if there was something that could automatically shrink dynamics and set them apart from coliding with articulations and notes etc. I've tried some plug ins that claim to be able to do this but perhaps I'm using them wrong. Nothing seems to work well. Do you have anything that can do this? It would be nice if there was an option that would point out or take you to collision areas such as when an articulation ends up in a note head and you miss it when checking a document. 

3. Instant Page layout: Page layouts in Score view have always been an issue for me. I avoid page view completely and when my scores are done I send them to a copyist to figure out. It would be nice to have a plug in that automatically lays out your page intuitively in regards to fitting the staves perfectly on the page by automatically shrinking or expanding them, fixing all collisions etc. My scores are pretty robust. 

4. Staff Freeze: It would be nice to have a plug in that can freeze an entire staff from beginning to end so that you can apply various global attributes to the entire doc with the exception of a highlighted staff, staves, region or partial region.
Too many times staves change, percussion notes are thrown all over the place when copying from one document to another, dynamics and expressions etc. globally change when you change the preferences and things have a tendency to just get bumped around. A frozen staff would not move any of it's elements at all. They would all be locked, regardless of any changes you may make in the document options etc. 

5. Partial measure edit: There are many plug ins and tasks that require you to highlight an entire bar but many times I do not want the data in the whole bar to change, just a few notes. Would be nice to be able to have certain plugins effect partial measures. 

6. Auto align: Automatically align dynamics and articulations. There maybe something that does this correctly but I have not found it yet. Sometimes articulations wonder a bit as does expressions, dynamics, etc. Would be nice to to have a plug in that automatically aligns these things in an intuitive way as to where they were meant to be wihout causing collisions. 

7. Forgotten Stragglers: Would be nice to have a plug in that finds measures that are missing descriptive info such as a starting dynamic, hanging tutti's and divis', missing "loco" at the end of an 8va passage, etc. or at least takes you to the start of divisis and pizzicatos so you can check if they have closure. My scores can be pretty complex and large and it's hard to find them all sometimes when checking. 

8. Cover Page templates: Would be nice to have some pre-created cover page templates or a template you can fill in that would create a cover page that has instrumentation, composers notes, percussion legends etc. The only way I figured out how to do it now is to create a blank page and build something on it with the text tool. Finale redraws every letter sometimes, massive waste of time. 

9. Spell check would be nice.

10. Attached ???: Would be nice to have a plug in that highlights all articulations, text expressions dynamics etc. that are attached to a particular staff, measure and note. For instance, you would highlight a staff and all it's elements (including attached to note or measure things) would be highlighted in one color. This way you can see if anything was inadvertently attached to the wrong staff, measure or note. So many times with big scores the only way that I know to do this is to extract parts and then check them with the score. But with something like this plug in you can check these things much easier while in scroll or page view. 

11. Independent Beaming:  Maybe I haven't discovered how to do this but when it comes to beaming there is no easy way to have Finale do exactly what you want. Float rests in one measure or more but not the whole document, Move rests to be in practical places along side notes. In the example below the clef for the Xylophone virtually every time I proofed this document? I can't figure out why. In this example I can't figure out a way to connect the beams to hang over the rests without changing the whole document in the preferences or document options. I would normally to in by hand and tweak by using special tools and beam breaks, etc. But that's really time consuming. 

12. Tempo Finder: In Finale there are many ways to set the tempo of a piece or a passage, or playback, record, etc. and sometimes it's difficult to figure out which setting has the hierarchy. It would be nice to have a plug in that gives a list of all the areas that have tempo alterations and which one is holding the hierarchy, and which ones are having no effect on playback. 

13. Importing Libraries: Either I'm doing something wrong or this system is too complex. I can't seem to figure out the import Library thing. When I import a library or join two scores together, or parts from an old score I would expect that Finale would create or add similar Expression categories, Custom shapes and tools etc. and merge together similar elements, but what it seems to do is add duplicates of similar elements. I would expect it to import Expression categories as they were in the original document they came from but it doesn't seem to do this. Would be nice to have a plugin that scans all your expressions etc. and does not duplicate identical ones when importing libraries or merging scores unless you wanted it to, and would place these things in the appropriate categories. 

14. Accidental Space: Most likely this is a user error on my part as there is probably a way to do this but so many times I'll cut, copy, paste, etc. and accidentals end up getting crunched into notes and I continually have to re-space in ways that go against the entire document settings. Even when I re-space there seems to be collisions with accidentals. Would be nice to have a plug in where you can highlight a bar and it makes room for all accidentals, trems, trills etc. and locks them in so they don't get crunched again. 

15. Articulation Flip:  In Finale you have to set the position of attachments but many times, with multiple layers or chords, or various manual alterations with stems etc and I find myself having to go in and manually move articulations in large regions. Would be nice to have a plugin that has a flip option that looks at existing articulations and fits them, without collisions, on the opposite side of where they are. 

Well, I can go on but perhaps that's enough, ha. 
If you are communicative on these things please let me know your thoughts. 

Once again, Thanks for all your dedication to these very valuable plugins you have designed and made available. 

Kind Regards

Steve Vai

On Mar 16, 2013, at 6:48 AM, Jari Williamsson wrote:

On 2013-03-16 14:21, KennethKen at aol.com wrote:

> Will the plug-in avoid showing the accidental if the altered note appears
> in the same measure a second time in the same voice (either before or after
> the  other voice has the altered note)?

A repeated note within the same voice/measure will give no suggestions to add repeated accidentals to the same voice.

The exception is when another layer/instrument cancel a previous accidental.

Best regards,

Jari Williamsson

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