In Software, Surprises are Usually Bad

This was driven home to me the other day when I was arranging some music using Finale 2008, a capable but complicated musical notation program. I’ve been using Finale for over a decade, but only occasionally.

A new version of Finale comes out every year. I upgrade at least every two years. Each new version has more features, and improvements to the user interface.

Improved user interfaces are usually exactly that, but only once you get used to them. It’s the change itself that’s a problem. Anyone who’s upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 or from Windows XP to Windows Vista knows what I mean.

I was adding choral accompaniment to a liturgical piece for cantor and keyboard. I started off by scanning the original arrangement into the program, and correcting the recognition errors. Then I wanted to add the choral staves between the cantor’s line and the two keyboard staves. A wizard helped me create the Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass staves with the correct clefs, but it added the choral staves at the bottom without giving me a chance to specify where I wanted them.

Fair enough. I saved the new version of the score, and with the Staff tool active I tried to drag the keyboard staves to the bottom and then evenly space all seven staves. I tried everything obvious, and got nowhere but frustrated: even when I did manage to get to the right view (this only works in page view), find the right handles (there are many, and it isn’t obvious which ones are for staves and which are for staff groups), and drag the keyboard staves to the bottom, when I applied automatic spacing they would pop back to their original position.

I pulled up the Finale help, spent half an hour going through everything remotely relevant to staff placement, and was none the wiser. Finally I searched online, and found an article in the Finale knowledgebase called Changing the order of existing staves in a song that told me what I needed to know: Finale needs to be explicitly told to change the staff order before the respacing step. The menu item is Staff | Sort Staves. I had no idea it was necessary.

I must not be the only composer or arranger to have this problem, because the knowledgebase article reads as though it were revealing a religious mystery:

To change the order of the staves is a three step process.

1. To begin you will need to be in Page view using the Staff tool. Grab the handle of the stave you want to move and drag the stave to where you want it. This will not move any of the other staves, however it will look crowded.

2. Then go to the Staff menu and click on Sort Staves. This won’t change how anything looks but it is an important step before we run the staff spacing.

3. Now go to the Staff menu and choose Respace Staves. In the Respace staves box you will probably not want to change any of the settings, click OK.

In some rare cases we have found that you may have to also reset the System Margins then in the Page Layout tool.

Now I have to figure out how to reduce the size of the keyboard staves so that I can fit two systems per page. It’s got to be here somewhere…