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Hello, everyone. This is my first post. >Yay!<

Any way, I have encountered this small but slightly irritating problem.

Let's say that I have a measure of treble clef, in common time. Let's say that I wrote in all eighth-notes of G-below-middle-C for this measure.
THEN let's say that I wanted to add to it two half-notes of C with it as well...

Well, FINALE won't let me do it.

I tried everything I could think of, and so did my best friend. We tried writing the half-note values first. But FINALE did the same thing that it did when I tried adding the half-note values after the eighth-notes were added: it changed the values of the notes in the measure to the note value I was TRYING to ADD in with!

THIS thing has us stumped, as we truly, madly, deeply believe in our hearts that we are just trying to write a simple chord. Is there a preference or preset that I can override, or is this one of the "features" (i.e. bugs, for you non-geeky types) of the software?

(BTW, I am using that free NotePad version of FINALE instead of the full version.)

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide,

M

I had a similar problem with Sibelius.
You need to make sure they are set to different voices.

If you have the free version, I'm almost positive you can't use voices. If you could, there would be four buttons: 1, 2, 3, 4 in the lower left hand corner of the screen. If the notes you're writing are black, and they shuold be, then click the 2 and write notes. they shuold be red. Write the eights in black and the halves in red or the other way round, it doesnt matter. But if it can't do voices, you're going to have to buy the real finale (or get it under the table hehe)