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Randomize Note Durations dialog box

How to get there

Choose Window > Advanced Tools. Click the MIDI tool $image\MIDI_Tool.gif$ . The MIDI tool menu appears.
Select a region of measures. If you’re in the MIDI tool split-window, select the region you want to affect by dragging through the "graph" display area or by selecting the handles of individual notes whose MIDI data you want to edit.
Choose MIDI tool > Note Durations.
Choose MIDI tool > Randomize.

What it does

In this dialog box, you can direct Finale to alter the duration values for all selected notes at random. This can be a useful option if you want to give your playback a more imperfect, "human" feeling; or, by very slightly randomizing the Start Times of the notes in your piece, you can alleviate MIDI playback problems caused by too much note information being sent at the same instant to your MIDI instrument. (The Randomize command isn’t available if you’ve selected Continuous Data from the MIDI tool menu.)

Start Times limited to ___ • Stop Times limited to ___. The numbers in these text boxes represent the amount by which you want to randomly vary the attack or release points of all selected notes’ playback (regardless of their notated durations). You’re specifying the maximum number of EDUs, of which there are 1024 per quarter note, you want added to (or subtracted from) the Start or Stop Times of the selected notes (see Start and Stop Times for a discussion of Start and Stop Times).

You might enter an EDU value of 1/16 (or less) of the predominant rhythmic values in the music, unless you want to produce unpredictable, strange rhythmic effects. To subtly soften the rhythmic precision of an eighth note (512 EDUs) passage, for example, you might type 32 into the Start and Stop Times boxes.

OK • Cancel. Click OK to confirm, or Cancel to discard, the MIDI data changes you’ve specified. You return to the MIDI tool split-window (or the score).