So, I was looking through my scores and found a piece that doesn't have a recording and I was curious about transcribing it into Finale to hear how it would hypothetically sound. The piece opens with an extended portion that is unmetered (marked by an X) and every "cheat" I found online just seemed too... clustered. Turns out, Dorico has this functionality built in. You can simply change the time signature to be unmetered. While I'm not necessarily looking to switch to Dorico just to do that, I am surprised it seems to be the only one of the big four notation programs that has this functionality. It's kind of a "didn't realize how much you'd use it until you realize you don't have it" situation. I'd love to see unmetered time signatures incorporated into the program itself instead of "hacked" in.
At the end of the day, I'm not going to spend an hour figuring out how to bend Finale to my will to do something I know other programs can do because I got a cool idea, I'll just end up not doing that cool idea. I'm a composer, not a computer hacker, and every minute I spend in Google trying to figure out how to do something a bit different than standard is a minute not spent on composition.
I know that it's a common joke that to do the weird stuff in Finale you have to find cheats and work-arounds, but at the end of the day, some of this stuff shouldn't be. Large time signatures are a prime example. There should be no reason I should have to go in and mess with document settings to get Large time signatures when that could be something that could be controlled elsewhere.
So TL/DR: Give me easy access to unmetered music writing without the cutesy "cheats" and also, if you have time, be a dear and give me an easier way to make large time signatures.
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