Hello Bill,

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

I don't have Finale, so I can't export to midi using it. I was hoping that there might be a conversion software means other that finale to do this or some the means to get a .mus file into composer.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>Off hand, I don't know of a stand-alone tool that converts Finale .mus files to MIDI or MusicXML. Recordare.com develops and markets a Finale plug-in, named Dolet, that converts Finale to MusicXML. Finale's own bundled MusicXML import/export tool is a lite version of Recordare's Dolet plug-in. This doesn't help you, though, because the plug-in requires to you own a copy of Finale.

Perhaps there is a round-about way to get from Finale .mus files to MIDI files, via some other notation program. I don't know what other notation programs, other than Sibelius, that can import Finale .mus files. I sort of doubt that any other relatively inexpensive notation program directly imports Finale .mus files, but maybe there is one out there that does so. If you find out, let us know. In that case, you'd be able to convert the .mus to MIDI and then import the MIDI into Composre, with unfortunately loss of a lot of notation information including layout.

I've already started implementation of MusicXML import, but have set that work aside for a while to work on some even higher priority new features (not yet announced). Even then, however, with MusicXML import in Composer, you would still have the problem that you would not be able to convert the Finale .mus file to MusicXML unless you had a copy of Finale.

This raises a question: How is it that you have a Finale .mus file, without a copy of Finale? This suggests to me that you might have gotten the .mus file from some musical friend who created the .mus file with Finale. If that is the case, then maybe your friend would be willing to export the song from Finale as a MIDI file for you. Or, if the situation is different, maybe you can just find a friend who owns a copy of Finale who would be willing to convert the song to MIDI for you.

Cheers
-- Mark