Working on an old score and the clunkiness of cross staff beaming has not gotten any better since the early 90’s. Here’s the current workflow:
- enter music in one staff
- Use the Note Mover tool to drag selected notes to the other staff
- Repeat step 2 a few times while cursing since it’s rare to select just the right handles the first or second time
- go to the Special Tool and drag the beams where you want them
- Now click on the reverse beam tool to fix the backward note heads (again, manually checking the microscopic check boxes)
- go back to the Beam Mover special tool to fix what the Reverse Beam tool screwed up when dragging the staves
- repeat the fun on the next measure
surely in 2023 there is a better way to do this. TGT has a cross staff plug-in but it’s not intuitive, has zero documentation anywhere (and Tobias is awol these days and doesn’t seem to respond to inquiries about this) and is limited since it assumes a real split point.
Another related issue: doing cross staff beaming between two different instruments only provides correct playback for the staff from which the notes originated. I’m sure that’s because Finale really considers cross staff notes to actually still reside on the native staff wheee they were entered. But it would be nice to enable notes to adopt the new staff.
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