So, here's the deal. And this is a long post... I'm sorry. I'm trying to be as clear as possible.
I'm using Finale 2005. Officially, it's called Finale 2005a, if that makes any difference for anyone. I've been using it since the Christmas celebration of 2004, when it was given to me by my family. I've never had any issues with it.
Until recently.
I'm working on two rather large projects at the moment - a Symphony (for a large-ish full orchestra), and a Suite for the Grand Organ. Problems presented themselves at first in the Symphony, but have began mirroring themselves also in the Suite. So here we go...
Whilst writing the second movement to said symphony, one day I was given one of those "This Program Has Performed an Illegal Operation and Will Be Shut Down" warnings. And of course, it did shut down, and I lost about three pages of music. After inputting all the music again (horrifically boring process, don'tcha know?), everything seemed to be okay.
I got several more pages written, but then as I was going back to edit something and add in a Trombone line, I came to the same page where I'd had the Illegal Operation crap, and it happened again. And I lost all the editing and Trombone-adding that I'd done.
So I gave up on that aspect, momentarily at least, and continued writing. On page... um, nine or ten, there is an enormous crescendo to an orchestral tutti, with lots of divisi strings and the like. Well... when I played this back, the crescendo sounded a bit shaky, if you know what I mean, and then out of nowhere, the strings part completely dropped out. Seeing as this was an appogiatura of a G# chord (enharmonically) to an F# chord, and the weight of the strings supplied the basis of the harmonic foundation, it simply sounded horrid. (The woodwinds held most of the melody, the Brass a harmonic counterpoint thing... and the percussion was mostly hidden, purposefully. I NEED the strings there... but they don't play.)
Now I know that playback isn't the ultimate goal of writing, etc. However, this particular movement needs to play back properly, seeing as my mother has requested a copy of it to be played at her wedding, which is coming up on May 5th. Yeah, that soon.
I've tried everything I can think of to fix this problem: I've rearranged all the preceding hairpins, even removing the crescendi all together just to see if they had some effect on it. Nothing. I've rescored the tutti and appogiatura, hoping that I'd somehow crossed the two Violin parts (which had been sharing the same MIDI channel, or whatever it's called). Nothing. I went into the Instrument List and reformed EVERYTHING so that none of the strings were sharing a MIDI channel. Nothing.
In desperation, I finally just sat down and started to recopy the entire thing into another file (including the aforementioned Trombone staff to save problems on that). However, when I got to that lovely THIRD PAGE, the Illegal Operation crap happened. Again. And I gave up.
Finally, last night, I was just hoping to maybe get through the tutti section, finish it up, and just force myself (and future audience) to deal with the dropping out of the strings at that part. However, as I was writing in the Harp part on that page, Illegal Operation. I swore a few times, opened it back up, Illegal Operation. A third try, same results.
So I've simply given up for now, on that.
Now then, on to the Organ suite. I'm only about ten measures into the
Prélude, and encountering similar crap. The three lines are all on different Channels, to avoid that shaky sound of clashed channels (can you tell I've some experience working with an under-channeled computer?). In this piece, the pedal line (which is randomly set to the "Church Organ" setting, simply because I want a more diapason-like tone from the pedal around the clarions and trompettas of the manuals. At any rate, the
Prélude is set to Adagio Doloroso, and is built upon (horrendous, according to my mother) dissonances in the manuals over a very slow-moving pedal line. Unfortunately, said pedal line just randomly stops playing every now and then. This file hasn't given me any of those Illegal Operation warnings, but for all I know, it might.
So there's my two mains problems; obviously, the more pressing problem is with the Symphony's file.
I've also made sure it's not just my computer; I do have Finale 2008 Notepad installed on this computer (my internet computer and Finale computer are two separate entities), so I opened the file in Notepad and found, much to my chagrin, that the strings dropped out at the same time. So, whatever the problem is, I have a feeling it's in the file itself, or worse, in Finale.
*huge sigh*
Anyone have any idea what I'm to do, besides chunk it out of the third-story window?
Thanks for your time, I greatly appreciate it,
~Dallas