I just did battle with the Playing Techniques editor trying to change the default position of about 10 user-created playing techniques from “above” to"below" by duplicating the playing techniques and making the change to the duplicate since simply changing the setting in the default playing technique after the fact doesn’t work reliably, as mentioned by Daniel.
However, as I feared, I encountered all the behavior that makes me nervous about dealing with the Playing Techniques editor: techniques not showing up after creating them, glyphs completely disappearing, glyphs showing up in strange sizes, not being able to get back to the original because one can’t tell what font is being used etc., changes in one playing technique changing all the others that may have been based on it.
Therefore I would like to restore my user library to the state it was in before I started editing. Can I do this from an older file that contains all the correct Playing Techniques?
It is not clear to me how to make the user library match a project file, only the other way around. The arrow only points from the user library side to the file, not the other way around.
I’m surprised to hear you’ve managed to get into such a pickle with the playing techniques editor, John. It works reliably. I’m not sure what you were referring to when you said that I have mentioned some specific unreliability. It could be you are thinking of the playback techniques dialog, which is (despite its similar name) not the same thing.
In any case, if you are having problems with the user library, yes, what I would recommend is to “un-star” the problematic ones, and confirm the dialog. Then open a project that contains the ones you want to return to the user library, and “star” them again.
Thank you @dspreadbury I was referring to the following:
and was attempting to follow your suggestion to create the playing techniques anew to change their position from above to below and have that stick as the default, since unstaring and starring wasn’t working consistently. But I recreated them by duplicating them, and deleted the originals which in some cases must have been parents of others and caused glyphs to go missing. Then I faced the great thorn in my side; the inability to know what fonts I had used originally and probably used Maestro instead of Finale Maestro or something like that which brought the glyphs in at the wrong size etc. etc.
None of this would have been necessary if I thought that I could actually get the change to stick by un-staring and re-staring. I will attempt to put things back as you suggested and then try the process again , perhaps with more success.
I followed your directions @dspreadbury and thankfully was able to restore the Playing Techniques to original condition.
Then I tried again to change a Playing Technique from "above’ to “below” in the way one would expect.
However, no matter in what order I:
a. un-starred,
b. changed from “above” to “below”
c. re-starred,
the change was never accepted as part of my user library and did not appear in a new file opened after the change was made. (Yet last year I was able to change a couple of them in this way.)
At one point I un-starred the Playing Technique, hit OK and to my surprise discovered on reopening the edit playing techniques window that that Playing Technique had disappeared from the list; I had to restore it as you suggested above.
Since I can’t seem to edit existing Playing Techniques in the normal way, I will use your original suggestion and duplicate them and change the duplicate. However, this leaves my panel littered with undesired items. If instead of deleting the undesired items., I un-star them, will this accomplish the same thing without creating the havoc I encountered when I started this thread?