IWBNI there were an option that could selected to specify that Finale documents should be saved in a compressed form.

This would be useful for reducing the size of Finale documents. In many cases, such documents can be larger than 1 megabyte, and generally, one saves and retains a large number of different versions of a given file during the course of a project. Also, compressed documents would be useful when transmitting files electronically as smaller files are transmitted more quickly.

This could be implemented by adding a checkbox called Save MUS Files in Compressed Form to the Program Options dialog box. If this option is not selected, MUS files would be saved as in the current version of Finale. Otherwise, documents would be saved in MUS files that are in a compressed form that could be opened directly into Finale in the same way that (uncompressed) MUS files are opened in the current version of Finale.

To test the degree to which a MUS file may be compressed, a typical Finale MUS file of size 1.222 megabytes was compressed to a size of 288 kilobytes by using the utility PKZIP version 2.04g.

Created: June 30, 2000 (based on comments by Tobias Giesen)
Last Updated: June 30, 2000
Version: Finale 2000b