


If you still need to select specific tools regularly, though, you can easily assign these to the keyboard Function keys for click-free operation. In practice, this means that visits to the Tool Palette need only now be few and far between, which is a relief. Double‑clicking on any selected item switches automatically to the appropriate tool for finer editing, and then Escape can be used to return to the Selection Tool. The new overarching Selection Tool makes a big difference here, allowing you to select, copy/paste and reposition notes, Articulations and Expressions without forever switching tools. One major area that has received a lot of attention is the ease of workflow, with a range of features aimed at taking the strain off your mousing arm and reducing the drudgery of repetitive notation tasks.
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This means that there's a lot less manual correction to do in terms of aligning such items or avoiding collisions with noteheads and beams, and this alone speeds things up a great deal. First of all, it's clear that MakeMusic have been very busy behind the scenes trying to make notation objects react more intelligently by default, particularly regarding how things like slurs and tuplets are displayed. So now that we've reminded ourselves of what Finale already did six years ago, let's have a look at some of the main ways MakeMusic have improved it since then.

Delve into the plug‑ins and you discover some enormously powerful batch copying and reformatting options, as well as various functions to make life easier for composers and arrangers: piano reductions, automatic accompaniment generation, instrument range‑checking, and various counterpoint tools, to mention but a few. You can then edit the way the raw notes look in phenomenal detail, not only within traditional notation styles, but also on dedicated staves for various different percussion, tab, and chord notations, adding in lyrics and custom avant‑garde staves/markings alongside, and auditioning the result via sampled instruments.īy contrast with the software's closest direct competitor, the more expensive Sibelius, Finale presents its editing options to the user via a hierarchical system of primary Tools, subsidiary Palettes, and Tool‑specific Metatools, and while this can make it seem a bit 'click‑heavy' at the outset, you quickly realise that the majority of these have keyboard shortcuts that take the sting out of this. Alternatively you can scan in existing sheet music using the bundled SmartScore Lite utility, or import a Standard MIDI File. Its extensive library of document templates and fairly painless Document Setup Wizard let you get started on entering notes straight away, using QWERTY or MIDI keyboards or even a monophonic audio signal. We last looked at MakeMusic's flagship music‑notation package, Finale, back in October 2004 ( /sos/oct04/articles/makemusicfinale04.htm), and reviewer Derek Johnson found a mature scoring platform with enough editing and engraving options for professionals, but also some dedicated tools and resources for education - an increasingly important part of the market for scoring software. The main editing window in Finale 2010 is not short of buttons, but as it turns out, the new Selection Tool (top left) significantly reduces the amount of time you need to spend clicking on them. MakeMusic's popular notation package strides forward into a new decade, adding a host of useful features.
