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Finale’s music spacing libraries were constructed by listing rhythmic values—from 64th note to double whole note—and assigning each a horizontal space measurement. Depending on your own tastes, you may sometimes want to alter the music spacing libraries.

To edit an existing Music Spacing library

  1. Load an existing Music Spacing Library as described above.
  2. From the Document menu, choose Document Options and select Music Spacing. The Music Spacing options appear.
  3. Click Spacing Widths > Use spacing widths table > Widths. The Widths dialog box appears, displaying a durational value (measured in EDUs, 1024 per quarter note) in the top box and its allotted horizontal width in the bottom box. (The units of the lower box are whatever you’ve selected using the Measurement Units command in the Edit menu.) Click Duration to see the closest notated equivalent of the EDU value. If you click the Prev and Next buttons, you can step through the various rhythmic values to see what horizontal space each has been assigned. (To help you with the math, remember that 512 EDUs is an eighth note.) Or click Duration and click the durational value whose allotment you want to change.
  4. Click Prev or Next until you locate the rhythmic value whose width you want to alter. Enter its new value in the bottom text box. In the quintuplet example, you’d actually want to create a new rhythm/width pair, and insert it into the existing library.
  5. To create a new rhythm/width pair, enter the rhythm value (in EDUs) in the top box, and its width allotment in the bottom box; then click Insert. When you do this, it will appear that you’ve typed over an existing duration/allotment pairing. But in fact, when you click Insert, you merely add your new pair to the library.
  6. Similarly, you can remove the displayed duration/allotment pairing by clicking Delete.  

Note. the other options in this box, by the way—by selecting the appropriate checkboxes, you can specify which musical elements you want Finale to consider when calculating new measure widths: Notes and Accidentals, Articulations, Chords, Lyrics, Note-attached Expressions, Clefs, Unisons and Seconds. See Document Options-Music Spacing for details.

  1. When you’re finished, click OK. Use the Music Spacing command (Utilities menu) to apply the new allotments to your document.

 

 

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