Optimizing Systems in Finale 2009

This is critical for people who write (or plan to write) orchestral scores. When a publisher assembles an orchestral score, it’s customary to remove any staff within a given system that consists entirely of rests. So if, for example, you are writing a score for a 24-piece orchestra which begins with a 16-measure flute solo, you would not want that flute solo to consume four full score pages, with 23 blank instrumental staves on each page. Instead, you’d want the flute line to appear by itself at the beginning of the score. Fortunately, Finale can perform this supression of blank staves for you, either one staff system at a time, or for the entire piece at once, in a process called (appropriately) “optimizing systems.” Tutorial 5 (Working with Scores and Parts) in the Finale user’s manual deals with this in great details.