I am having the same problem. I have Finale 25 running on Mac OS 10.12.4.  I have Garritan Instruments for Finale and Garritan Personal Orchestra 5.  Besides playing the wrong pitches, my playback has the sound sorely out of tune that it's unlistenable!   I don't know if I need to uninstall the old versions of Garritan that it could be causing some conflict.  I also had some older versions of Finale, but I trashed the those applications, but I don't know if there are some lingering files that need to be deleted.  This is a real problem.  I can't make any demos.

It all seemed to start when I installed Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 last summer.

Rudy Lupinski,

Does it happen in all documents - or only in specific documents?

Please specify the steps you've already taken, so that we can rule out things.

Have you e. g. tried

- closing the document, and opening it again?

- quitting Finale, and launching it again?

- logging out, and logging in again?

- re-booting the computer?

Mine happened if I stop in the middle of a glissando. Maybe other effects do this too.

Maybe check your mod wheel.

In my case closing and reopening the document did not fix it. Remember my issue is with trombone glisses. If I stop playback in the middle and restart at another place, the trombones are all out of tune. The only fix is going back to the glissando and playing all the way through it. Then the pitch seems to be reset correctly. Even closing the file (after saving) and reopening did not correct the pitch.

I've done all of your suggestions and they didn't work. However, in GPO 5 you have a choice between notation and standard instruments. I was using notation. I switched to standard and the problems stopped so far. Right now I haven't had time to work with it. I'm going on a trip and when I get back I'll see if the problems return. Sorry for taking so long to reply. I appreciate you getting back with me so quickly.

I am having the same issue. First it was the flute and oboe in a full score (no glissando) then it spread to my brass. It's random and I can't figure out how to make the instruments play the correct pitches. They are a half step too high. Sometimes they raise pitch while I'm holding the note down. Like a mod wheel. Even the piano.... I'm so frustrated.

Have you tried Rudy's solution? Have you created a ticket with Tech Support? Use the Submit a Request link at the top of this page.

I too have a similar problem with version .25 - everything is a half tone higher than concert pitch. It only happens when I use Finale not as a stand alone instrument (keyboard). It has affected my previous 2011 version also. I think perhaps it's a Garritan settings problem........any ideas welcomed.

Not sure what you mean by " It only happens when I use Finale not as a stand alone instrument (keyboard). "

Make sure you have not inadvertently changed the MIDI output pitch of your keyboard. I have occasionally set something on top of the keyboard and moved a slider without knowing it.

Thanks for your reply.

The stand alone keyboard is playing correctly at concert pitch. However Finale is not whether I use the on board Garratin sounds or indeed another VST they play back almost a tone higher. It's as if the pitch has been adjusted via Finale. Weird but that's what is happening.

Is there a parameter within Finale that can be set or adjusted to maintain concert pitch when using Finale? It happens on any new score so it isn't something I have adjusted in any one piece like Pitch Wheel etc.

Any ideas.

I fixed mine by reassigning playback sounds. (Midi/audio menu) it's a headache but that fixes things for a bit.

Happens to me all the time (I have Finale 2014 and see here it probably won't help to upgrade). It's become quite insufferable for the last few days. No glissandi or special effects. Switches between voices. It's making my work extremely hard!

ok I just found out that muting and unmuting the instrument in the Mixer helps for a bit. (Reassign playback sounds didn't work any more, nor closing and opening the file or rebooting the computer or the midi connection)

Make sure all parameters match .i.e 44.1 KHz.

Including your audio interface if used.

Also make sure the pitch wheel hasn't received a midi instruction.

Re instrument changes - it seems there is possibly a glitch in ver 25 in that the older Finale versions gave you the choice to deselect 'Send patches before play' If you are using VSL instruments or other VST make sure only one instrument is loaded in the Matrix otherwise Finale will automatically select bank 1.......hope that makes sense but that's how I remedied my problems.

I encountered the "wrong note" bug yesterday. I have Finale V25, installed a year ago. I've done a lot of work since then and only hit the bug in one section of one arrangement yesterday. It happens nowhere else.

There's talk here about Garritan - I really don't care how the playback sounds as long as is produces the correct notes, so I just took the defaults on Finale installation. So I don't know if Garritan is in use or not. There's an ARIA player icon on my desktop, but I've never touched it.

I've frequently made one change to playback. When playback produces no sound, I click on MIDI/Audio to get the dropdown list and change from "Play Finale through VST" to "Play Finale through MIDI". Then I change it back to VST and it plays properly. That happens every month or two.

For this piece, I did select MIDI /Audio -> Human Playback -> Jazz, but now I've deselected it, with no difference.

Several notes in my arrangement sound bad, but I've pared it down to a one instrument, three bar passage which makes the bug very apparent.

Close doc, reopen, quit Finale, relaunch, shutdown cold, reboot computer. Tried all that. Problem persists.

Rudy asks "notation or standard instruments". Sorry, I don't understand the distinction. I opened Finale, did new -> Document with Setup Wizard, "create new ensemble", "Jazz band doc style", selected two alto saxes, two tenors, one bari, saved as "jazz band sax section". I wrote all five parts for the first 36 bars with no problem on playback. The next 8 bars have several wrong notes on playback.

I had hoped there was a way to upload my example .musx file. If I could upload it, you could find that at [A], at beat 3, the E natural sounds as Eb. It's E natural on beat 2 1/2, and it's E natural at the start of the next bar. The problem is there regardless of "Display in concert pitch" or not.

Any help or suggestions will be very much appreciated. Thanks, folks.

Just to be sure I understand: you are not getting the "wrong" pitches but notes that do not sound good. Am I correct?

If so...

That might be a case of the Audio buffer being set too low--try setting a higher number.

You might also try changing your Audio driver (if you have that option). DirectSound and ASIO work differently and may make a difference. I used to use DirectSOund by default, but I suspect Windows 10 frequently changes it to ASIO without my knowledge..

Regarding Rudy's question, the standard or notation instruments. Always use the notation instruments when playing back through Finale. The standard instruments are to be used in a DAW. The notation instruments have keyswitches which can be triggered by text expression from Finale. If you use the setup wizard, Finale should load the notation instruments by default.

Glisses have always caused problems with Finale's playback. Try making a copy of your score and removing any glisses or pitch bend info. Then check playback on that file.

Thanks for the information, folks, I appreciate it. There are no glisses in the arrangement, but there are ties.

I noticed that the playback problems only occur when there's a tie between two or more notes. For example, E tied to E (sounds as Eb). Or, in a key with many sharps, a G natural tied over the barline sounds as G# in the new bar.

Given this new clue, I Googled a bit and found an interesting function in Finale online documentation:

! correct accidentals on tied notes
! Click the Selection tool image\Selection_Tool.gif, and select the region whose tied-accidental notes you want to correct.
! See Selecting music for some region-selecting shortcuts.
! Choose Utilities > Check Notation > Check Accidentals.

Actually, in Finale 25, it's Check Notation -> Check Ties.

Think about that: "correct accidentals on tied notes". Why did the Finale developers add this function? I think it's because they knew that Finale can screw up the accidentals on tied notes, and it's a way to highlight Finale's errors, so the user can fix the notes manually.

When I select the segment with the problems, and apply "Check Ties", Finale removes the ties and displays the accidentals for any notes which are handled incorrectly. For example, my tied E to E to E now displays without ties as, E to Eb to E natural.I can then remove the errant flat, reapply the ties, and it plays correctly. What's funny is that the bug is so inconsistent. I'm working on a five-part arrangement, jazz sax section. There's a point where an eighth note ties to a half note in the next bar in all parts. Two instruments have naturals tied over. For one sax, the natural is applied to the following bar, for the other, it is not, and sounds bad. I can correct it by selecting an explicit natural, and dropping it on the affected note. There's no difference in the display, but now it plays back correctly.

"Check Ties" caught all but one error. There's another tie over the barline which it did not detect, but I heard it and corrected the note.

Now that I have a better idea of what's going on, I'll try to report this to Finale support as a bug. However, it's quite possible their reaction will be "That's why the Check Ties function exists", rather than fixing the underlying problem.

It depends on how the notes are entered, I think. When I'm entering from the QWERTY keyboard in Simple, I hear the notes as they go in. Since my entry method is note, tie, note, after all these years, I know that if I have an accidental tied across the barline, I have to reapply that accidental. If I'm working with a scanned score via XML, I take it for granted that there will be errors in this, so I check on them.

I guess I don't consider it a bug, although others, might.

Re: Mike's comment:

> It depends on how the notes are entered, I think.

Agreed. On this piece, I'm creating a five-staff score from hand-written parts. So I transcribe the top line with simple entry, add articulation, etc. Then I cut and paste it to the second line, transpose down a 3rd or 4th (whatever's closest), then adjust notes as needed. Ditto for the next three lines.

The top staff throughout never has any problems with accidentals with held notes. My guess is that the transposition is imperfect, when there are held notes.

> If I'm working with a scanned score via XML, I take it for granted that there will be errors in this, so I check on them.

I was not aware of this functionality. Man, I have to try that right now. If the scan is halfway accurate, that could save me hours. Thanks much for mentioning it!

Stephen,

 You won’t be able to import a scan with F25. That functionality was removed. (It didn’t work very well, anyway.) If you want to work with scanning, I would suggest you look at SmartScore X2 Pro, available at http://musitek.com 

Once you learn to use the program (and believe me, there is a learning curve!) you will save plenty of time. I’m happy to answer any questions you have about it. Unfortunately, the scanning program won’t work on handwritten scores, so it won’t help on this project.

>> The top staff throughout never has any problems with accidentals with held notes. My guess is that the transposition is imperfect, when there are held notes.

Make sure you are using chromatic rather than diatonic transposition to produce a perfect transposition by interval. Properly configured, the transposition utility has worked flawlessly for me (AFAIK) since version 1.

Why would one method handle tied notes, and the other not, I wonder?

Could some of those ties actually be slurs? It has happened before in other cases.

At any rate, I have never had problems with the transposition tool.

Stephen,

When you enter notes in Finale, you are not just entering a graphic image, you're also entering midi data whether you use playback or not. When you enter an accidental into a measure, the accidental does not carry through the measure as it does if you wrote the music out by hand. When you enter a tie to the note, the tie does not carry the accidental through the measure.

You wrote, For example, my tied E to E to E now displays without ties as, E to Eb to E natural.I can then remove the errant flat, reapply the ties, and it plays correctly.

The E-Eb-E are the midi notes that have been entered. That's what is going to play back. Just by adding a tie to the notes will not change the Eb to E nat. The tie will not change the pitch of a note.

This is how Finale has always worked. It's different from how I was taught to write music. But it all becomes logical when you remember that you're creating midi data, not just an onscreen image.

And there are other users, who will enter the E-Eb, and use a tie when they should have used a slur. In that case, the music will playback correctly but look wrong because the tie will hide the flat.

If the music is entered accurately using the right tools, then it will look and playback correctly.

> Make sure you are using chromatic rather than diatonic transposition to produce a perfect transposition by interval.

Interesting point, thanks. I was using diatonic transposition. Just now, I grabbed a fragment of a line (which had previously caused the failure), and tried to duplicate the bug, but it transposed (diatonically) perfectly. I would like to duplicate the bug, but for now, I'm more interested in finishing the score.

Once I duplicate the bug, I'll try the chromatic transposition, and see if that avoids the problem. Then I'll file a bug report with Finale, and see what happens.

> Why would one method handle tied notes, and the other not, I wonder?

I've done the programming on very complex software projects. The "why" is that really complex code always contains bugs, because the developer did not anticipate the particular sequence of events. Or it worked until a "simple" fix in the most recent update. You can't test for everything. You just release your product, people start using it in unique ways, and they expose bugs.

> Could some of those ties actually be slurs? It has happened before in other cases.

There are both ties and slurs in the music. The problem only occurs when I transpose a segment containing ties.

> At any rate, I have never had problems with the transposition tool.

I didn't either, and I've found the transposition to be very helpful, and used it frequently with no issues. Just the middle section of this one piece trips up.

Random out of tune notes on playback are maddening! I am not yet able to discern any rhyme or reason to when Finale decides to have an instrument play 1/2 or 1/4 tone off. Switching from VST to MIDI and then back again and then reassigning ALL of the Garritan instruments temporarily "cures" the playback problem but it keeps recurring.

I expect you have made sure your speakers are not failing.

This is not normal Finale behavior.

You might also check your Aria player to be sure a Scala setting has not been set on the Tuning section of the Settings Tab. It is a far-fetched possibility, but it's worth checking. Mine says "01-equal.scl"

Michael's problem is what happens my side too. There's nothing wrong with my speakers and no change in the MIDI keyboard.  I did find a faulty slur once (when the slur didn't fix itself onto the next note but tied unto itself instead (if you get what I mean). Not always the case though. Quite maddening. 

I've read all the posts and have not read the solution to the problem.  I'm using v.25 on Windows 10.  This has been going on since I upgraded to v.25.  However, it seems to be a Garritan problem. When I switch to Smart Music Soft Syth, the problem seems to go away. For example I have a short part in Clarinet 1 that I copied and pasted to Clar. 2  and clarinet 1 started to play the notes a whole step lower.  When I am using Speedy Entry and hold the midi controller key down, I can hear the note pitch waver.  I reinstalled Finale and Garritan  and that changed nothing.  Big project, not a lot of time, help.