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Sharing your music online and across programs.
Finale makes it easy to access your music in other programs on your computer. It can share its images with graphics programs, its lyrics and text blocks with word processing programs, and its music with sequencers or other notation programs.
One of the most useful examples of Finale’s cooperation with other software is its ability to import and export standard MIDI files. Most sequencer programs (Digital Performer, Sonar, Cubase, and so on) can generate and read MIDI files. You can create your music in your favorite sequencer, save it as a MIDI file, and open it with Finale to convert it to standard notation. When you attempt this process, you’ll discover that Finale offers literally dozens of options for separating and recombining the music on the various tracks of the sequencer file. If you want, Finale will even retain the velocity, rhythmic “feel,” and controller information from the original sequence. See MIDI Files for more details.
Note, too, that Finale 2014 can read files created in other music notation programs from MakeMusic, including Finale SongWriter®, Finale PrintMusic®, and Finale NotePad®. Files created in earlier versions of Finale, as well as any MakeMusic notation program, can be opened in Finale directly, even in the opposite platform. For example, files created in PrintMusic 2011 for Windows can be opened in Finale 2014 for Mac. You can also read older cross-platform files, including those from Allegro® and Finale Guitar.
Note: No older MakeMusic products can read Finale 2014 files directly. To share your files with others who do not own the most recent version of Finale, have them download Finale NotePad® 2014 which is available for free at www.finalemusic.com/notepad and will open any file saved from Finale 2014. Also, you can use the MusicXML utility to save files which can be opened by older Finale versions (back to Finale 2000) using the Dolet plug-in. See also Importing in the User Manual for more details.
In addition to the plug-ins available with Finale 2014, there are also a number of additional plug-ins available created by third-party developers that can improve efficiency and automate tasks. For example, the TGTools and Patterson Plug-ins Lite options under Finale’s Plug-ins menu are samples of the full TGTools collection available at www.tgtools.de and the Patterson Plug-in collection available at www.robertgpatterson.com. There are also a number of other plug-in available. See www.finaletips.nu for a list of several.
In addition to third-party plug-ins, you can also use music fonts created by third-party vendors. A wide variety of music fonts are now commercially available and can be used with Finale. See Fonts in the User Manual.
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