Opening and importing files - Finale Tutorial

- [Instructor] As we begin to learn Finale, we'll often work from existing files. So let's look at how to open, import, and save files. So existing files can be opened a number of different ways. First of all, when you open Finale, the Launch Window opens and we can click the Open button here and we can navigate using the interface. Let's go to the Desktop and to Exercise Files. These are the files for this course and then I'll go into the Getting Started folder. And we see this Woodwind Quartet.musx file here. And by the way, .musx is the file extension for Finale files and has been since about Finale 2014. So if I want to open this, I can select it and click the Open button. For now, I'm going to click Cancel and I'm going to go over here to the File menu and reopen the Launch Window. 'Cause I want to show you here that there's a popup menu for recent files. So if I click this, I can choose one of the more recently open files and I can get at it that way. Now we can do both of these things from the File Menu itself. So if I go up to File, I've got open here or I've got that same group of recent files under the Open Recent. And this time I'll go ahead and I'll click the Woodwind Quartet option and we'll see that the file opens. Now that we've got the file open, if I've made changes that I want to save, I'll go back to File and I can choose Save. And if I do that, it's going to save my changes over the existing file. If instead I want to save those changes as a new file, I'll choose Save As and I'll change the name somehow. In this case, I'll add a v for version and I'll add my initials. And I'm going to go ahead and put that on the Desktop, so I'll click there and I'll go ahead and click Save. Now Finale can also open other types of files that might have started in another notation program or possibly in a production program like Pro Tools, Logic, or Ableton Live. And there's two primary types of files, one which has been around for a long time, and that's referred to as a standard MIDI file or a .MID file. So I'm going to open one of those. So let's go to the File Menu and I'm going to go to Open, and then I'll navigate back to that same folder. So I'll go Desktop, Exercise Files, to the Getting Started folder. And here I can see that in addition to the .musx file I've also got this .mid file. So I'll choose that and I'm going to click Open. And this time we're going to get a dialogue box that allows us to set a number of options on how Finale will open this file. Now all of this stuff that we see here on this first part of this page, I'll typically leave it set exactly the way it's set. But I will go ahead and click the Quantization Settings button, so that I can signal to Finale how I want it to import the rhythms. Now please note that the way we perform music is much more sophisticated than the way we notate it, and how we interpret notated music. So in this case, I'm going to tell Finale what the smallest note value in what I'm importing. And as I look in the background, I can see that the smallest note value is an eighth note. So I'll leave it set at an eighth note. And then I'm also going to indicate to Finale whether or not there are any triplets. Now triplets fall under this larger heading of tuplets. So I'm going to, in this case, say No Tuplets. but if I did see any triplets or related tuplets I would go ahead and I would click the Mix Rhythms option here. Now I'm also going to go into More Settings, and here I'm going to make sure that the Minimized Number of Rests is enabled. And you can see from this picture what's going to happen. If there was a 16th note here and a 16th rest, it would convert it into an eighth note so that it's simpler to read. And you know, if that eighth note had a staccato on it, we would play it as a 16th and a 16th rest. So this is helpful in simplifying the way the music looks. I'm also going to make sure that the Retain Key Velocities and Retain Note Durations are enabled because what that will do will be to bring in the original performance in a way that if I play this I'm going to hear the original velocities and note durations. But I'm going to view the changes that we have made with the settings that we've selected in these dialogue boxes. So I'll go ahead and click Okay, Okay, and Okay. And Finale has imported that .mid file. Now you can see that there's a lot of stuff missing from the original. And if I flip over there, you can see that we've got a lot of text items and articulations, and crescendos, and dynamics. And when I go back to the .mid file, we don't see any of that. So this has been a handy way to move notes from program to program or from a production program like Logic or Ableton Live where we've maybe started a project and we don't want to have to reenter the notes. But it's not the best way anymore to do this. So this time I'm going to go up to the File Menu and I'm going to go down to Import and I'm going to choose Music XML. And that's taking us right back to the same folder that we were in, and I'm going to choose the Woodwind Quartet.xml file. And I'll go ahead and click Open. And it's quickly opened that file and we can see that this looks virtually identical to the original Finale file that I created. So this is a really great way to exchange file information from a program like Finale going to Sibelius or the Reverse or going to some of the newer programs like Dorico. And we can even use this option with music production programs like Logic and Cubase. It's not as widespread yet but I hope it will be in the future. So in this case, you can see that we got all of the tech stuff, we got the dynamics, we got the crescendos, and you can even see that it's imported the key signatures and that it has recognized that flute, oboe, and bassoon are concert instruments, and the clarinet and B flat is a transposing instrument. And its key signature is a whole step higher than the others, which is the way it should be. This is the way to exchange information between these programs if that option is available. So now that you know how to open and save files, we'll take a deeper look at the Finale user interface in the next video.