Finale has an enormous wealth of features under the hood, but getting to some of these power tools quickly is not always straightforward or intuitive.
Finale has a few keyboard shortcuts hardwired to various tasks. For instance, number keys correspond to durations during note entry as they do with all scoring programs. However, as of Finale 26. Finale still does not offer user programmable keyboard shortcuts to access the majority of its menus and functionality.
So, historically, users of Finale have had to figure out their own solutions to speed up workflow. Finale itself offers some very powerful plugins, and two different scripting languages; FinaleScript and JW Lua designed to increase productivity.
But, how are you supposed to access all of these productivity tools quickly without something as basic as user customizable keyboard shortcuts?
This is an addendum to the announcement yesterday of the Finale v26.2 update; This is mostly important for users who already installed the original v26.2 update; version 26.2.0.456.
Shortly after releasing Finale version 26.2 yesterday, MakeMusic became aware of an issue in which the document setting for “Under/Outer Note” ties was placing the tie end too far to the left of the notehead.
The good news is that this problem lives in Finale’s drawing engine, meaning that your document data is safe and unchanged.
Another issue was reported for documents set to “Keep Current” for grace note spacing, where if Music Spacing is applied, horizontal positioning of grace notes can unexpectedly be altered.
MakeMusic has already fixed and fully tested these two issues, and have pushed out a hot fix today. If you have already installed v 26.2, you will get another in-app notification to install the 26.2.1 hotfix next time you launch Finale.
The main installer downloads have been updated as well as of today.
Finale has released the latest maintenance update to Finale 26; version 26.2.
Since introducing Finale 26, which had several major new features, much of the focus of development has gone into technical improvements under the hood; admittedly, unglamorous architectural work designed to bring Finale into the future.
This means that while you may not see much change on the surface with this point upgrade, the underlying code is being updated dramatically.
According to the Finale Blog article from October of this year, senior manager of the Finale product development team Jason Wick stated: “The architectural work that we’ve been doing modifies hundreds of thousands of lines of code and those changes are investments in the long-term viability of Finale.”
The Finale 26.2 point release is a continuation of MakeMusic’s “long game” trajectory. For instance, on Mac, this update ensures that Finale v26 is compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina.
Nearly all of what is going on with this update is laying the code base groundwork for future, larger improvements and features. This will mean that significant new features will be easier to implement in the future.
Performance
In working with Finale 26.2 over the last couple of days on Mac, while I can’t provide any scientific evidence to back it up, it seems more responsive overall to me than the previous Finale 26 versions.
Library / House Style Improvements
Finale’s libraries now retain more information. A subtle, but nice enhancement to Finale 26.2 are the inclusion of Page Format for Score and Parts as well as Guides when you export / save a Library.
Finalescript
FinaleScript’s import options commands now import all associated options.
ARIA Player
Finale’s ARIA Player has been updated to v1.959 in the full Finale installer. if you would like to download the update directly, the ARIA Player v1.959 installer is available in the MakeMusic Download Library.
Patterson Beams Plug-in
The Patterson Beams Plug-in has been updated to so that grace notes and resized notes appear more elegantly. Stem lengths and beam angles look like they would at full size, and place themselves more appropriately within the staff lines.
Installers
The various Finale installers for the application, Aria player and on Mac ReWire are now compliant with current OS security protocols. Finale users on both platforms can be more confident that their software install is safe and stable.
On Mac, for instance, Finale executables such as ReWire now comply with Mac notarization standards. The Apple notary service is an automated system that scans the software for malicious content, checks for code-signing issues, and provides alerts to any potential problems.
I’ve been using the update in my regular work on Mac now for a few days, and everything is really stable on Mac (which as a professional user as you can imagine is very important).
I’m also please to report that v26.2 is excellent with my (free) JetStream Finale Controller, which you may have been hearing will be released this year.
Summary
In summary, my recommendation is to update. Finale 26.2 is a free maintenance upgrade for all Finale 26 users, which is paving the way for future functionality and power.
Dorico 3 brings comprehensive support for fretted instrument tablature. Regular staff notation and tab are linked and can be displayed at the same time. Learn how to display or hide rhythms in tab. Dorico 3 gives you complete control over the strings and tuning of your fretted instruments, and this tutorial shows you how to change the string for a given note and how to define a custom tuning.
Dorico Pro 3 can automatically condense music for multiple players onto a smaller number of staves in the conductor’s score, while maintaining separate instrumental parts. Learn how to switch a layout to a condensed score view with a single click and discover some tips and tricks for inputting music and managing your scores.
Welcome to the 4th installment of the learning to code in JW Lua series!
We’re going to take a step back in this article and next week’s article to help give you a better grasp with what’s actually going on. Because learning to code is good, but coding well is really what we’re after.
This series creates a bit of a conundrum because there’s three huge topics to cover:
Programming Practices
Lua language
JW Lua
Each one of these topics is enough to have 10+ hour paid courses for, but we’re trying to cover them all at once. Hence, there are many footnotes to each article.
We’ve taken quite a bit of time learning about the Lua language and JW Lua, so it’s about time to step back and look at some fundamental programming practice that you need to know if you’re going to code.
Just like with creating music, thoughtless/sloppy code really degrades the value of the final product. So today, we’re going to look at some of the aspects of writing great Lua code.
Welcome to the third installation of learning to code with JW Lua for Finale. So far, we’ve learned the basics of the Lua language and have written one small script in JW Lua. Today, we’re going to expand on the script we wrote last time to help us really get more comfortable, while introducing another really important aspect of coding: the if statement.
And by now, you might start to see why JW Lua can be incredibly powerful in Finale. Though you haven’t really written much, you can already start to see that the ability to create loops and edit the music on the page can really speed up your workflow.
But we’re still missing one key ingredient: logic.
And that’s why we use if statements in programming. It allows the code to start making intelligent choices, which will allow you to code up many of your repetitive tasks instead of doing them all by hand.
