And how will your musicians play this?

You can assign a different tempo marking to every beat if you want. That would give you control over the tempo rather than leaving it up to HP.

Re: Mike Rosen

I don't understand the question, or its relevance to my problem. Part of Finale's functionality is being able to "teach" the program itself how to play something. My problem is getting the tempo alteration represented by an executable shape and various parameters affecting how it's used by Finale in playback actually reflected in playback. Like I said, it doesn't seem to have a problem executing the shape when it's about, say, pitch or volume or transposition--just when it's a tempo alteration. There has to be something wrong with the way Finale is configured, because changing the shape, the Level & Time Scales, the sampling rate, repetition, and other parameters doesn't seem to fix the problem. No matter what, the music still plays at a constant tempo. I don't have a playback problem when I let HP determine the rate of change for me, but for the life of me, I can't seem to set up a tempo transition manually!!!

Finale's User Manual is great when it comes to defining what specific features do and providing specific arbitrary examples, but it doesn't tend to provide general-purpose rules or "formulas" for determining how to create a new, arbitrary scenario with a specific tools. Maybe they think that non-programmers will balk at seeing "variables"--the only concise way to deal with hypothetical general-purpose situations, but for those who put that much thought into defining expressions that it becomes "algebraically methodical", variables and formulas for setting up a general case would be useful. Which brings me here:

My real effort is to learn how to use executable shapes to define custom transitional expressions in general, be it tempo or other kinds of alterations--and have them represented in playback. Since I'm currently working on defining a tempo transition, I'm going to focus primarily on tempo here, but what I'm about to present could just as easily apply to volume or pitch or something else. General scenario:

I want a passage in my music to go from a value (say, of tempo) of initialvalue to a value of finalvalue over a duration span of a/b eight notes (this may last part of a measure, a whole measure, or even a series of measures depending on the duration), updated at time increments of n/d eight notes (a/b and n/d are fractions that may mean effectively shorter or longer durations and update intervals). Ideally, I don't want to set this update entirely with the Shape Des., since it doesn't provide a way to keyboard in "exact" coordinate values for the contours of a shape (Imaging trying to define a shape that single-handedly precisely raises the tempo by 160 over the span of 32 eight notes!)--I want to be able to use Executable Shape Designer's text inputs as much as possible.

My guess is that it's best to use a pre-defined shape, say one that goes up or down at a 45-degree angle (1:1 change), then set the Level Scale to (|finalvalue-intialvalue| * b) : a and Time Scale to n : d, with Sample Rate at 1 and Repeats set to 1. If this is wrong, then something close to this must be right, say with Level Scale at (|finalvalue-intialvalue| * d) : n and Time Scale at Time Scale at a : b, and/or with Repeat at n-1.

In any case, I've tried all sorts of shapes, ratios, and values in the designer, and nothing--nothing at all--produces any change in tempo over any time span of the score--much less to the specific degree, length, and frequency of updating that I desire. So I'm thinking that it's something other than the way I'm defining the shape--like something defined document-wide or program-wide.

Re: Jeffrey Turner

Setting a different tempo marking to every beat over the span of several measures would be tedious, assuming we're talking about individual tempo expressions manually inserted at specific note locations. I'm looking for a way to use executable shapes to define a precise tempo alteration over a precise duration and update-frequency--using a single "custom expression". The manual suggests it should be possible to create a fine-tuned user-defined tempo transition using exec. shapes, but no shape or set of parameters I use produces any change, let alone transitional change, in tempo. I can do it with other musical parameters--say volume ("key velocity")--but not with tempo. (Even when the change is set to, say, volume instead of tempo, the change appears to be one-time rather than transitional.) The manual gives an example of using exec. shapes to create a specific custom accelerando effect, but no info on how to do a general-purpose case of it (that is, how to change the shape or parameters to change the degree, duration, and "smoothness" of the effect).

I don't just want to know how to create a desired audio effect "quick and dirty"--I want to know how to use shapes to create it. Theoretically, exec. shapes would allow one to finely define a specific "custom" playback effect and carry it out with a single custom expression. But something's not right here.

Everybody--I'm not asking specifically for how to create a tempo transition by any means possible. I'm asking for how one, in a general case, uses executable shapes to do it. The manual says that one can define custom transitions--tempo or otherwise--using exec. shapes. But it doesn't give a general-purpose "formula" for cases other than the specific custom effect given, and playing around with the Exec. Shape Designer doesn't seem to do anything to playback when I try it. This is all about creating custom transitions of any kind using exec. shapes, not about tempo transitions in particular.

I agree, I have the same problem.  Has there been a solution to this?