MIDI playback in Finale 2014.5 randomly affected by simple editing

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PETER WILDE Posted September 06, 2019 17:21

OS: Windows 7 Pro

Finale 2014.5

A problem with my copy of Finale 2014.5 that seems to be getting worse with time is that in some scores, random simple edits can have profound negative effects on playback. The most common result of something as simple as deleting a note or copying and pasting a bar of music is that the playback volume of most of the instruments drops to almost nothing. It's as if the Key Velocities have been set to zero on most of the notes in the score,

I checked to see if that what was happening, but the KVs were uneffected. The result is something built into the score. I can export the score to a MIDI file and open that file in a sequencer.- the dropped volumes still occur.

Sometimes, weird effects occur at random on some sections. All of a sudden after an edit, a section of bars will have extreme reverb or vibrato.

I have followed the steps for "Clear MIDI data" using the selection tool and the submenu item innumerable times. That never works when one of these strange sprites occurs.

Has anyone experienced this or have any advice?

8 comments

Date Votes

J ADRIAN VERKOUTEREN Posted September 06, 2019 22:06

As far as volume goes, I'd take a look at the Finale (not the Aria) Mixer. I have sometimes found the volume slides mysteriously lower than I remember them.

(I don't imagine you are the victim of another incidentally that affected me. My sound disappeared until I found out that somehow my mouse cable had rubbed against the volume knob of my speakers, turning them to zero. Color me embarrassed!)

PETER WILDE Posted September 06, 2019 22:35

Thanks, but no, that is not the problem.. Also, I use headphones so the knob issue doesn't apply either.

J ADRIAN VERKOUTEREN Posted September 07, 2019 15:27

What would happen if you exported your file as XML and then imported it into a new Finale document? That sometimes clears out invisible clutter.

PETER WILDE Edited September 07, 2019 17:10

Thanks, J. Adrian. I hadn't thought of it. That worked wonders - it eliminated the playback issue. There were two problematical by products: the DS al Coda and the DS sign were lost, and all of the chords playback after being silenced originally. The first is inconsequential, except that it shouldn't happen. The second is annoying, and would take a lot of work to fix. I can mute chord playback by channel in the Score Manager, but my experience is that they will be present and play back in any exported MIDI file.

However, this is great. I'm going to see if I can just copy the notes from the imported file into the bad staves in the original.

Thanks, again.

PETER WILDE Posted September 07, 2019 17:29

Copying the notes didn't work.

What did was copying everything but the notes (chords, articulations, rehearsal marks, etc.) from the corrupt .musx file into the imported .xml file. There is still work to do, but your suggestion saved me from doing a lot more.

Do you have any idea why this happens in Finale? I started with Finale 97 twenty years ago, and every version I've had has always produced a few files that had this playback dropout problem. Am I the only one?

J ADRIAN VERKOUTEREN Posted September 07, 2019 21:48

I really have no idea why it happened ("gremlins"? A reason we used to give students when our school first adopted computers many years ago).

Since you are a long-time Finale customer, you could use the "Submit a request" link at the top of the page to contact Finale Support directly, and that avenue, I believe, allows you to send them a copy of your original, troublesome file for their analysis. That's what I would do.

PETER WILDE Posted September 08, 2019 15:44

Thanks for the suggestion, but they stopped providing support for version 2014.5 last March.

J ADRIAN VERKOUTEREN Posted September 08, 2019 21:47

Bummer, even if I understand MM's rationale.

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