With the next version of the MacOS not supporting Rosetta, moving music from ongoing projects from Finale to Dorico becomes much more urgent. I have a 2 hour and twenty minute sung through musical still in development that I need to move to Dorico. Thirty songs, but one of them was written in Dorico. I am in the stage of trying to find solutions for problems with the Finale XML import into Dorico. Note that I have created a Dorico project that has all of my players and the instruments they hold set up the way I want them to be, matching what I had in Finale as well as I can.
Here are my initial notes:
French Horn does not merge with existing French Horn
Contrabassoon does merge with Contrabassoon & Bassoon player
My original Finale file had a grand staff for all of the Menās Chorus and individual staves for each individual member of the chorus. That seemed to confuse the import process and music did not import to the correct character. Once I eliminated the Menās chorus grand staff the music did transfer correctly to each character. Note that I also had to designate each character as tenor, baritone, bass as they were set up in Finale. It also correctly ignored the six main characters who do not sing in this first song.
In Engrave mode, the lyrics are all smooshed together. It didnāt respace to make room for them. Engrave>Format Music Frames>Reset Layout fixed it. Note that when I imported to a project with all other flows deleted first, the lyrics did not smoosh together.
I have a player named āPercMTBā who holds a Marimba, Tubular Bells and an Agogo. In the import a new Marimba Player is created. The marimba of the existing player is not found.
Unpitched percussion could be a huge issue. I have five percussion players and four of them each hold a different percussion kit, three of them quite extensive. The fourth holds timpani, tubular bells and a smaller percussion kit. The fifth holds marimba/tubular bells/agogo. Dorico imports them as Percussion Sections and notates them accordingly. Is there any way to avoid having to reenter percussion from scratch? Many songs use from one to three unpitched percusion kits, but some have five, with the Marimba/Tubular Bell/Agogo player playing agogo.
In Finale I notated instruments with two players on one stave, expecting one player to play the high notes and the other to play the low notes. Even though I have two players set up for each of these instruments in Dorico, Dorico imports it as one player. Is there any way in Dorico to easily move the low notes to the second player and keep only the high notes for the first player (with spots where only one note is notated going to both players)?
I need to dig to remember how to reduce the size of the dorico file so that I can upload it.
Act I, Scene 1a, What Is Your Crime for Dorico 260329.mxl (265.2 KB)
Honest Men for Forum 260330.dorico (2.3 MB)
Apply the Silent Playback Template could help
Finale 27.4 is compiled for Apple Silicon, so itās not Rosetta thatās the issue. (And Rosetta will be removed in OS 28, not 27.) However, there are already interface problems with running Finale in Tahoe; and thereās no word on whether the installation process works on Tahoe either. These issues are likely to increase with each new OS version.
Weāre likely to see a ādeath by a thousand cutsā, where Finale gradually becomes less reliable, crashing under certain circumstances, buttons not working, until eventually it stops launching altogether.
That having been said: I wouldnāt update to OS 27 (the next one) until c. January of next year at the earliest. Iām still on Sequoia, and will probably stay on it until I see how OS 27 pans out.
Instruments from XML imports donāt always merge with existing ones: sometimes they come in a ācustomā instrument definitions with the same names, rather than Doricoās own default definitions; or they are āwrongā in some other respect (e.g. Strings not being Section Players).
The quickest fix is to select the item on the very first beat of that instrument, and press āSelect to End of Flowā; then Alt Click to copy into the correct staff. (I use Command E as a shortcut for that Select operation.)
Dorico does have a Filter for Bottom Notes in Chord and Top Notes ā but if thereās only one, then it gets selected. I do a lot of āuncondensingā XML that came in as two voices and chords. It is a bit of work to select the bottom notes and Move to Staff below. You have to do it in chunks, but once you get used to it, you can do it fairly robotically without thinking too much.
None of these problems is unheard of, as XML implementation differs from program to program and is not an exact science. I recognize many of your difficulties from transferring a couple of musical scores from Finale to Dorico (initially one song per file before combining them) some years ago.
Be sure to print out your Finale score as PDF if you have not done so already.
I hope your transfer goes as smoothly as possible, but it is by definition a complicated process.
Thanks. Before I updated to Sequoia I created a bootable Sonoma partition on my internal drive and installed a copy of Finale there as an emergency backup. That reminds me that I need to boot it up now and then to install updates, to keep it as secure as possible. I already get a number of odd behaviors with Finale running under Sequoia. If I do succeed in moving my musical to production, it will still be a years long process, so I need to get it into Dorico and find the most efficient way to do that.
Thanks. I did export my Finale files to xml, midi, and pdf. What I mostly use Finale for now is to make changes that will make the move to Dorico as smooth as possible.