This is more an explanation of what I’ve found over the last week than a question of help (though help – corrections to what I wrote here – would be appreciated). I’ve got about 900 Finale .mus files to convert to .musx, .xml, and .pdf. I ran into difficulties using a script to process folders and subfolders and worked with Finale Customer Support. This is what I learned.
- As others have said copy your original .mus or .musx files to a separate conversion folder to prevent damage to the originals. The new files are then moved back to the original folders.
- Finale Customer Support is not equipped to offer help debugging a script.
- They recommend not putting conversion to .musx, .xml., and PDF into one script because the script process is too precarious. Yes, that means making a pass through the files for each type of output. I tried combining them and could not get it to work.
- There is a command Export > Translate Folder to MusicXML so a script isn’t needed for that.
- Once the .musx files are created delete the .mus files before going on to create .xml or .pdf. This is another reason for working in a separate folder.
- While the script can read from many subfolders it can not write all files to the folders where the corresponding .mus or .musx files reside. And in some cases it moves the .musx files.
- That means don’t use subfolders and process one folder at a time. Not as much batch as I had hoped.
I quickly saw that converting from .mus to .musx didn’t always pull in all the VST data. Batch processing to create audio files would not be possible. For me that’s OK because so many of my .mus files are works in progress to a final composition and I need an audio file of only the final work.