Thanks, Drew, that makes sense to me now.   I’m now a little confused on what exactly Hobbyist can do with racks – hoping you can help clarify that. I certainly understand the visual layout and UI that shows you racks with effects is in the pro version only. However, I thought that after I added racks to my show that a rack would be assigned in the effects window. I’m either still doing something wrong or I’m misunderstanding the racking capabilities in hobbyist.  Without any assigned rack, I’m unclear what the available rack report options would provide.   It does looks like if I try to open the racking window, I can see racks in the bottom and they’re assigned a number. I can manually assign this number in the effects window.  Is that the suggested workflow to actually assign effects into racks within hobbyist or is there some way to expose how finale3d allocated effects to generate rack counts?   thanks, -Brett   DrewFinale wrote: Great question, Rack Type is available in Hobbyist and it’s built to handle exactly the kind of scenario you described. If you’re creating your own racks, you set specify the Rack Type for your racks in the “Rack Type Default” column of the Effects Window. To pair your slices with your slice rack, you specify the same Rack Type for your slices in the Rack Type column in the Script window.   Here’s a video tutorial that demonstrates exactly how to do this for shells, the principle is exactly the same for cake slices and other kinds of effects.   https://finale3d.com/video/using-rack-type-to-pair-fanned-shells-or-fanned-chains-with-fan-racks    

Hi Barehm, since 76ProLinePeter isn’t the author of this topic, he’ll only get an email notification if you mention him by typing the ‘at’ symbol followed by his display name, or if you hit the ‘Reply with Quote’ button to quote him in your post. That is of course assuming he has email notifications enabled in his profile 🙂   Jumping in for Peter, I can say unequivocally that Spirit of 76 and Finale have the goal of improving everything in the Spirit catalog to make it more realistic. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s a high priority and we’re laying the ground work for the project now.

Great question, Rack Type is available in Hobbyist and it’s built to handle exactly the kind of scenario you described. If you’re creating your own racks, you set the Rack Type for your racks in the “Rack Type Default” column of the Effects Window. To pair your slices with your slice rack, you specify the same Rack Type for your slices in the Rack Type column in the Script window.   Here’s a video tutorial that demonstrates exactly how to do this for shells, the principle is exactly the same for cake slices and other kinds of effects.   https://finale3d.com/video/using-rack-type-to-pair-fanned-shells-or-fanned-chains-with-fan-racks

After dropping down the file type on the save dialog it was easy to import.  I was able to import everything with all the values I needed for my availables, prices, and even some info I find useful that I put in some user fields.  Everything imported and it recognize all the column names.   I’m a happy camper again.

Using “Rack Type” to control what types of racks are used for what effects   This article indicates Rack Type is something available to hobbyists, but I don’t see that field when I’m adding racks to my show. I’m trying to add a slice holder and limit the cakes that are slices in my show for assignment into that rack.  Can you help clarify how this can be done without the rack type field in the rack itself?

76ProLinePeter – not sure if you’re looking for feedback on other cakes that need work, but I often was running into placeholder looking cakes in the spirit of 76 library.   Examples: 1) Cherry Bomber 2) Bling Bling 3) Spring Bouquet (GM693)   Is the goal to get these all built out more realistically?

Pyro-Lite that update should be all set. Thank you for bringing it to our attention!

Hi Pyro-Lite, welcome to the Finale 3D community forum and thanks for posting! 76ProLinePeter, welcome to you too and thanks for jumping in!   Pyro-Lite, I took a look at the two Spirit cakes you mentioned and you’re absolutely right, the stars have smoke but not color. The full VDL for each cake is below. The issue is just that there is no color specified. The fix is easy, the word “White” just needs to be added preceding the word “Strobing”. Peter should be able to get these fixed up in no time.   GM487 –>  2″ 37.00s 2.00 PFT 10 Shot Strobing Peony Cake (1 Row) MS480 –>  25mm 30.00s 1.40 PFT 16 Shot Strobing Cake (4 Rows)

For what it’s worth, I entirely missed this recommendation and did everything with CSV and it worked fine.  commas are appropriately escaped and recognized by finale3D in my testing.  Now I’m wondering what might hypothetically break! 🙂   -Brett

Hello Pyro-Lite! Thank you for bringing this to our attention! We will get that updated right away and get a few more improvements in place for our catalog.