Finale 2004 Human Playback Demo

August 08, 2003 - Jari Williamsson

I noticed that MakeMusic! in their promotion material for Human Playback just compared the WAV sound output of Finale 2004 with MIDI output. This will perhaps not help you to know what you should really expect when you press the play button on your own Finale documents.

I've created a quick-and-dirty example of the beginning of Tchaikowsky's 5th symphony where you can compare the visual document (in PDF format) with the final sounding result (a WAV file converted to MP3). This is how it would sound if you save to WAV, or if you use the Finale 2004 SoftSynth output device for playback.

Some information about the Finale document:

• The document was created by the Document Wizard as a full score
• The document is optimized to save some printing space
• The visual document is not a demonstration of good engraving...!
• The Human Playback style is "Custom". The settings modified from the default values were: 5% Rhytmic Feel, 5% Rhytmic Accents, 40% Reverb
• All string sections are using the "String Ensemble 1" General MIDI patch. Each string section has its own MIDI channel. Clarinet in A is using the Clarinet GM patch. Bassoon is using the Bassoon GM patch.
• No other "modifications" done prior to playback!
• The playback was saved to WAV with the "Save As Audio" feature and was converted to MP3 file with "Easy MP3 Converter"

[Here is the PDF version of the Finale document]

[Here is the playback result as MP3]