From the course: Finale Essential Training

MIDI and audio setup - Finale Tutorial

From the course: Finale Essential Training

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MIDI and audio setup

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- [Speaker] Setting up your MIDI keyboard and audio system is an important part of using a program like finale. Let's walk through the setup process. So first, you're going to want to connect your MIDI keyboard your audio interface and speakers if you have them. Then you can go ahead and turn on your computer and turn on your devices. Next, you'll want to open finale. And when you do that, it's likely that this launch window will open. Let's go ahead and close that by clicking on the little x button in the upper right hand corner. All right, let's start by making sure that our MIDI keyboard is set up to work. So, I'm going to go to the mid audio menu and down to device setup and then select MIDI internal speaker setup. Now, this window's a little bit different on a Mac than it is on a pc. So on a Mac, you're going to have to choose the MIDI driver and you should leave this set to core MIDI. On a pc, you won't see this option. It's automatically using the built in MIDI driver. that's part of the os. Now, below that, on both versions of the program, Mac and pc, you'll see this option for auto detect input devices. Now, if that's enabled, you should be able to look in the window below that, the popup menu and you should see a ghost image here of your mini keyboard. For example, here we see my novation, SL mark three. Now, if you do not see your MIDI keyboard listed there, you should go ahead and disable this auto detect option and then click the popup menu and choose your device from that menu. All right, I'm going to leave this enabled. So, next, you're going to want to go over to the right side and on a pc, you're going to see a MIDI input option and you're going to want to set that to smart music soft synth as we see here with the playback two option. The other things that exist here are kind of the built in options that come with your operating system. So here we have QuickTime playback and on a PC, you're going to see an option there for the MS Wave table synth. In both cases, I would suggest that you use your default device as this smart music soft synth. The sounds that it includes are better than the ones that are built in and they require little CPU power and best of all they really won't interfere as you're building a score. In later videos, we'll talk about ways to enhance the sound of finale's playback. All right, now we've got that set. I'm going to go ahead and click okay and then I'll go back to the MIDI audio menu and device setup. And this time I'll choose audio setup. Okay, so we have a couple things that we need to do here. First of all, we need to set our input for a microphone and in my case, I do have an audio interface connected. So, you would click this menu and choose your interface from the available options. I have a Prism Lyra, and that's what I've chosen. So you would look here, find your interface or, if you don't have an interface, you'll look for one of the built in options. Next, I'll drop down to the source for output. And again, you're going to want to choose your interface or one of the built in options. And in my case, I'm using a video program to record this video. And in order to capture the video, I have to choose that program. So that's why mine's a little bit different. Normally I would be choosing the Lyra 2. Below that, I would suggest that you set your buffer size. When you are actually recording audio or midi, I would suggest that you set this low somewhere in the 128 to 256. And then, when you are done entering MIDI notes with your MIDI keyboard, you can go ahead and you can set this to a setting like one of the highest, like 2048 or 4096. But once you have these two options set, you can test whether or not you're getting sound by clicking on the test audio output. Let's check it out. (keyboard note ringing) Okay, so that's working. So next I, what I want to do is just make sure that my MIDI keyboard is working with finale. So I'm going to go up to the file menu and I'll choose new and then I'm going to choose default document. Next, I'll make sure that the simple entry tool is selected. That's the eighth note that's pointing kind of straight up, not in italics, like the speedy entry tool. And then you can select a rhythmic value from the simple entry palette. Now, once you've done that, you'll see the note enter cursor here on the staff and I'm just going to play in a few notes just to make sure that finale will actually allow me to use the keyboard to enter the notes and also that we actually hear a sound when I play a note. (soft keyboard music) Okay, so now that our midi and audio devices are set up, we're ready to start using finale.

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