Spotlight on Plug-ins
Welcome to the Spotlight on Plug-ins
This series will look at all of the native and third-party plug-ins that are available for Finale. Each plug-in will get its own video. Keep checking back here as I'll try to add to this series as frequently as I can.
Spotlight on Plug-ins #1
Patterson's "Copyist's Helper"
Download the Patterson Plug-ins here:
http://robertgpatterson.com/-fininfo/finmaincontent.html
Robert Patterson’s “Copyist’s Helper” plug-in is perhaps one of the most valuable plug-ins that you can own, particularly if you’re a musical theater copyist. This video highlights some amazing additions to the 6.03 version of the plug-in which was released on Feb. 6th, 2021. There’s a brand new feature that allows you to insert or delete measures while retaining the measure numbers (0:37). Yes, automatic A and B bars have finally become a reality in Finale! Inserting and Deleting Systems while also retaining bar numbers is the other new piece of this plug-in (8:23). Both of these features solve some other long-standing problems with inserting and deleting Measure Number Regions and/or Systems in Finale. This is an absolute MUST HAVE!
Starting at (13:33) I explore the already existing features of the Copyist’s Helper plug-in, mainly related to measure numbers, including a really helpful operation that can be done on Multimeasure Rest ranges that will list the ranges with the correct A and B or cut bars. The other side of the plug-in is the Instrument Headers tab (27:24). There’s a specific solution for listing the currently held instrument for Reed Doublers in page headers (28:44), and there’s a newer function that uses Finale’s Bookmarks to force-create section specific text blocks (33:57) which is useful for multi-movement files.
Finale V26.3
Spotlight on Plug-ins #2
Move Rests...
In this Spotlight on Plug-ins video, we take a look at Finale’s “Move Rests…” plug-in. It’s a rather simple yet powerful plug-in that is built into the program, so we all have access to it out of the box. This plug-in allows us to move all the rests within a selection vertically up or down any amount of steps that we want. This is particularly important when working with multiple layers on a staff or when working with rhythm parts where we may have cues above or below slash notation.
Finale V26.3