Anyone Using Finale With A Mac? Options

[blueroom]

I recently purchased a Roland Fantom X6. I use a Mac G5 and have installed Finale 2005. I can't seem to get Finale to send patch changes to the Fantom. When I do the Tutorial in the Finale tutotial book (chapter 6 - more midi topics) the result I get is not correct - the patch assignments are not recognized by the X6 - it plays all the parts with the one sound - whichever sound the X6 has selected on its screen - not affected by the data I have entered in Finale. However, I can enter notes in Finale using the X6 as a midi source so I know the computer and the X6 are sending and receiving the midi signal.

Is anyone at this site using Finale with a Mac? Can you offer any suggestions to get me started?

Any help would be appreciated.

blueroom

[ghess]

Re what both ghess and MidiMacMan said about "open the instrument list...do not change the channels listed..." I'm puzzled. I had assigned each staff its own patch on its own channel (e.g. staff one is "flute", midi channel one, GM 74 Flute, staff two is "Choir", midi channel two, GM 111 Choir Aahs, etc) When you say not to change channels...don't understand - I have to assign each sound its own channel, no?

Finale handles program changes in a rather strange way. Rather than letting you just send a program change on a channel, it defines an instrument such as flute and assigns it a MIDI channel. The default setup has 16 common instruments defined, one for each channel. What I was saying is don't change the channel assignment or you will end up with two different timbres assigned to the same channel, which of course won't work. For example, in the default setup Grand Piano is set to channel 1 and Flute is set to channel 4. If you change Flute to channel 1 in the Instrument list, it will say Flute channel 1, but the program change message will still be for Grand Piano. You have to also change the patch under the GM column or better yet Select View by Instruments and edit the instrument. Once instruments are edited to your liking, you can store it as a Library (File:Save Library) and also include it in your default template.