Finale 2009 Human Playback Problems

So I am running Finale 2009, and I've checked elsewhere on this forum to make sure somebody else hasn't already asked the question. I only checked to page 4. So.. sorry if this is a repeat.

Problem: I often experience a crash in Finale when I try to start playback at the left-most measure in the middle of a piece with Human Playback turned ON. The moment I turn it off, I can play from any measure, and I'm fine. But when HP is turned on, I have to either start playback from the beginning (which can get REALLY annoying when you are far in the piece) or just HOPE that a certain measure I want to chance will actually play back without crashing. Sometimes it will play back fine, other times it crashes.

Is anybody else having this problem? Has anyone found a way around this?

I am running a HP Windows Vista Home Premium, AMD Phenom 9750 Quad-Core Processor, 8GB Ram, NVidia GeForce 9500 GS, with Finale 2009.

I have the same problem! It's quite annoying, and audio with HP off is so boring..

I don't have any solution to the problem, just know you're not alone :P

I have this problem quite often. Yeah, it's annoying. And yeah, there's a way around it, but it's still pretty annoying.

If you go to Playback Settings, choose Playback/Record Options... in the lower right corner. There should be a drop down that says Dynamics and Markings. If it's selected as Chase from First Measure, set it to either Reset or Use Current Settings. This is for PC only. No clue what a Mac Finale interface even looks like.

This should fix the crashing, however, this is the perfect example of this still sucking.

You write arco for a violin in measure 46, and in measure 78, the violin is now pizzicato. Play back from measure 52? Pizzicato. Why? I can only speculate that since you're using the current settings, it performs the HP that was most recently submitted. How annoying indeed.

But at least it won't crash. And to me, that's the biggest problem. Hope this helps!

Ah! Thanks! It's really annoying, especially with a composition with more than 200 measures or something..

I've encountered this issue ages ago and I suspect the reason this occurs is because when you begin HP in the middle of a piece, Finale first "plays through" the entire piece leading up to that point "in its head", as it were, to make sure all the HP settings will be playing properly at whatever measure you're starting from. The problem is that it takes a lot of brainpower to do this, and if your computer isn't particularly speedy, it will crash. The algorithm itself is fairly poor, so even a decent computer will likely still pass out with the effort.

In any event, none of you should be concerning yourselves too much here because Finale is meant as a notation program. You make sheet music with it. It isn't really intended for accurate or flexible or realistic playback; all of the features they have to sort of lean the program in that direction are marketing afterthoughts in an effort to make the software more appealing to beginners. If you're aiming to produce realistic audio on your computer, you're looking at getting and working in a sequencing program like Cubase or Logic or Reaper (which is free) after writing your piece in Finale/Sibelius.

Hmmm.........REAPER isn't technically free. The demo doesn't expire, but it needs a licence, so continuing usage is the same as cracking Cubase.

A true free DAW is LMMS, which is open source.

It's true, it's more like free-ish for non-commercial usage. But either way, it's a lot more of a DAW than LMMS is and a more useful one to learn as far as I'm concerned since the learning curve going up to one of the "real" DAWs will be lessened down the road. But the point is that either way a DAW is what one uses for production.

I've encountered this issue ages ago and I suspect the reason this occurs is because when you begin HP in the middle of a piece, Finale first "plays through" the entire piece leading up to that point "in its head", as it were, to make sure all the HP settings will be playing properly at whatever measure you're starting from. The problem is that it takes a lot of brainpower to do this, and if your computer isn't particularly speedy, it will crash. The algorithm itself is fairly poor, so even a decent computer will likely still pass out with the effort.

In any event, none of you should be concerning yourselves too much here because Finale is meant as a notation program. You make sheet music with it. It isn't really intended for accurate or flexible or realistic playback; all of the features they have to sort of lean the program in that direction are marketing afterthoughts in an effort to make the software more appealing to beginners. If you're aiming to produce realistic audio on your computer, you're looking at getting and working in a sequencing program like Cubase or Logic or Reaper (which is free) after writing your piece in Finale/Sibelius.

Are those programs easy to use?