Why I Love Finale

Today I had the idea that Bach's Two Part Inventions would sound nice played by flute and euphonium, so I fired up my trusty Finale music notation software and did a quick arrangement of #2. Here's how long it took me:

• Entering the notes - 14 minutes
• Checking for errors and adding some slurs and articulations - 5 minutes
• Adjusting page format to fit on two pages, creating titles, and printing to pdf - 6 minutes
• Creating a few playback trills - 6 minutes
• Recording to mp3 and normalizing the playback file - 3 minutes
• Grand total - 34 minutes

Have a look at the printed score here, and if you like click here to listen to the arrangement played by Finale.

I could have done the arrangement a lot faster with a MIDI keyboard but I don't have room for one in my office. Instead, all the notes were entered using Finale's Speedy Entry tool and the number pad of the computer keyboard.

Call me crazy, but I think that is stunningly realistic playback for a computer program! Finale made huge strides in the 2007 release towards imitating human playback and instrument sounds. If I wanted though, instead of recording to mp3, I could have saved the file to MIDI in a couple of seconds, resulting in a much smaller download but variable results playing the file back on computers with different soundcards.

The latest release of Finale includes the ability to import live audio into your music arrangements. Wow!