Finale’s Finale - TidBITS (2024)

Notable Replies

1. [Moving the pre-publication discussion over here to keep it all in one place. -Adam]

   Finale, a music notation program that has been the standard for decades, has run out of steam. (Note: I know well that there are more recent competitive applications, and I don’t intend to derogate them by that statement.)

   Here is the email that MakeMusic, Finale’s publisher, sent out this afternoon:

   Dear valued Finale customer,

   Today, we have important news to share with you regarding the future of Finale. Effective immediately, we are announcing these changes to the Finale software:

   • There will be no further development on Finale, or any of its associated tools (PrintMusic, Notepad, Songwriter
   • It is no longer possible to purchase or upgrade Finale in the MakeMusic eStore
   • Finale will continue to work on devices where it is currently installed (barring OS changes)

   For over four decades, our engineers and product teams have passionately crafted what would quickly become the gold standard for music notation. However, as technology stacks have changed, and millions of lines of Finale code have added up, delivering incremental value for our customers has become exponentially harder over time. Instead of releasing new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we’ve made the decision to end its development.

   We want to sincerely express our warm and deep gratitude to all of our loyal and passionate users. While Finale development has come to an end, we know your musical journey has not.

   To ensure that you continue to have access to high-quality notation software, we have partnered with Steinberg, the creators of Dorico, to offer exclusive discount pricing on Dorico Pro for all Finale and PrintMusic users.

   We truly believe Dorico is the best home for Finale users looking for a new music notation tool to continue the amazing work they are doing.

2. I’m sure all who use/used Finale know already, but an option I’ve been using for decades is Sibelius, now owned and continuously maintained by Avid. And it’s relatively easy to move Finale files into Sibelius:

   "If you have music created in Finale or one of its cut-down variants (e.g. PrintMusic, Allegro, Songwriter or Notepad), you can export a MusicXML file (from Finale 2004 or later) and import that into Sibelius. Most other music software exports either MusicXML or MIDI files, both of which can be imported by Sibelius.”

3. Quite a number of the professionals I’ve known who used Finale moved off it some time ago. Often to Sibelius; a few to MuseScore. I’ve seen Dorico in the wild, but haven’t spoken at any depth with anyone using it.

   There was a time when my life was littered with PDF and printed music generated from Finale. It was certainly a core application for many musical endeavors for many, many years.

4. Both good points. A number of younger professionals I’ve worked with use Sibelius because it was adopted by their conservatory or school. I also worked with a composer who used it for a full length opera and while she swore by it, occasionally spent hours trying to accomplish something that Finale handles easily. (The reverse is also true for other instances.)

   The bizarre-ish issue here is not so much whether Finale will live (it won’t), but the apocalyptic tone of the announcement, the apparent confidence that its user base would happily buy into a platform most of them never heard of, and the line drawn at 365 days after which the program could no longer be activated.

   This evening MakeMusic recovered from their shocking stupor enough to announce that activation would continue indefinitely and that Fibale v.27 (latest and last) will be downloadable from Steinberg so that files can be exported to MusicXML and from there to Dorico—and of course other apps.

   Some credit due there, but friends of mine have been calling this a tremendously tone-deaf announcement of EOL for an app that has been active and adopted in many settings for over 35 years.

5. 

   I have a friend who’s a community college music professor who feels the school really dodged a bullet since they had been using Sibelius for years. I think there was agreement around rough feature parity, but the bigger issue for schools that had standardized on Finale is the (presumably unbudgeted) cost of all the new licenses. Hopefully the folks at Sibelius realize what an opportunity they have to be magnanimous while probably doubling their installed base.

6. I took a look at the Dorico macOS and iOS demos yesterday. They seem good enough, but no reason to take on a new learning curve, or endure yet another MusicXML migration. I’ve done 3 or 4, and they are definitely over-rated. Consistently, charts would need considerable “repair.” I will be sticking with Notion, because it has everything I need and is more affordable. I’ve also been having more success with its hand-writing recognition lately (which I don’t think anyone else has?).

   I started with the Finale low-end app, PrintMusic, moved to Sibelius G7 (which was my favorite of all I’ve used). However, Sibelius killed it, and I would have had to go to the top end for one deal-breaking feature. Sibelius is still too expensive for me. Then I tried GP6, finally landed with Notion for the right combination of features, support, and price for a bucket-list jazz guitar student…

   ;~}

   I had the last release of Finale, but didn’t really use it.

7. Yes to that. They would have (presumably) a full year during which a budget cycle would come up, but there’s also time for instructors and support folks to get up to speed on the software before it can be rolled out to students.

   With MakeMusic’s later announcement they’ve backed off a bit on that timeline, but that just makes the pressure OS-dependent.

   I’m wondering if they ran into a major show-stopper with the upcoming MacOS version and that prompted them to pull the plug.

   Hoping so.

8. When I deleted the Dorico (and Sibelius) demos, they both had substantial files in /private/var/db/oah. I had already deleted the applications, so I couldn’t determine if they were still Intel code? Notion Mobile is not, but Notion desktop is still Intel also.

9. I notice that no Dorico users have chimed in here, so I will. I started with Finale, moved to Sibelius, and then on to Dorico when it first came out. It’s a stunning piece of software, and gets major updates about twice a year. Of course there’s a steep learning curve, particularly because the development team started from scratch and built the app on a new set of assumptions, partly informed by the fact that many of them had been fired by Avid and picked up as a group by Steinberg, so they understood Sibelius from the ground level.
   Music engraving is an extraordinarily complex and fussy job, and because the basic underlying assumptions of Dorico are different from both Finale and Sibelius, one’s habits built up over years of using those programs will need substantial revision. But Dorico can do almost everything its older siblings can much faster and better as well as a lot more. The output is outstanding out of the box and everything can be adjusted manually (though it’s usually not necessary if your initial settings are good). Add to that the fact that the documentation is splendid and the user forum is one of the best I’ve ever seen, constantly monitored by the development team and full of quick responses from experienced users, and the move to Dorico is well worth the effort. And the crossgrade offer is extraordinarily generous.

10. Thanks for the input. I did get the impression that Dorico might have finer control than Notion (which has been one of my complaints with it), but as you say, the interface assumptions are clearly different (maybe that’s good, I wouldn’t hand out awards to any of the ones I’ve used). One thing I was impressed with was that the main screens in macOS and iOS were almost identical. Still debating the new learning curve. But the cross-grade looks like a good deal.

11. What a shock. Finale was once the standard for music publishers; decades ago, I interviewed for a job that required mastery of its model interface—at one point neither the interviewer nor I could figure out how to get it into a certain mode. It was at the same time the standard in education; I once took a course in Arranging that I joked should have been titled “Arranging in Finale.”

    Sibelius came along with a different paradigm that was less complex, but when it was acquired by Avid it took on an onerous and annoying copy protection scheme. For certain things, e.g. notating guitar, I found it just as frustrating and opaque as Finale.

    Dorico has a lovely full-featured iPad app that offers a lot of functionality before requiring a subscription, but the Mac version requires (again) annoying copy protection (music apps assume, perhaps with justification, that musicians are thieves). As with the others, the learning curve is steep.

    Notion is less full-featured but a lot cheaper, is easier to use, and was one of the first to produce a useable iPad app. Unfortunately on Mac it’s been hampered by a long-standing bug in step input that keeps skipping beats, so you end up with measures of out-of-place input.

    These days I find it easiest and simplest to use Guitar Pro. The notation is not as accurate or flexible as the pricier programs, but for occasionally putting down a guitar part for my own reference, it does the job. Anything else, I’d probably use Dorico on iPad, though it might be just as easy for me to write it out by hand.

12. I worked at a store called Computers & Music in Daly City, CA from 1983 to 1990. We sold Finale when it was first released. I don’t imagine much, if any, of the code that ran on the Mac Plus is still in use. But I’m sure a lot of the code is extremely old and was written using APIs that are long obsolete. As a programmer, I’ve been involved in rewriting applications from scratch when it becomes impossible to maintain the original code. It’s a horrible experience. You spend a lot of time, effort, and expense to move sideways at best. Usually, you wind up with some subset of the functionality of what you’re replacing. I can easily envision MakeMusic weighing the costs of rewriting Finale against abandoning it and choosing the latter.

    For those unfamiliar with the Dorico backstory, here’s a short synopsis: Avid fired the entire Sibelius development and support team en masse. Steinberg (a subsidiary of Yamaha) hired them en masse and gave them the time and resources to write a new notation program from scratch. Once Dorico was released I switched over and stopped using Sibelius. At that point Sibelius seemed to be in maintenance mode with no significant improvements. I haven’t looked at it since, so I don’t know if that still holds true.

    Dorico is a powerful and flexible program. Using it, it’s obvious that it was designed with a strong foundation. I was happy to see that MakeMusic decided to partner with Steinberg to transition Finale users to Dorico. I think it has a much better future than Sibelius. (Just as I thought Sibelius had a much better future than the older Finale, which turned out to be the case). It has a steep learning curve, but so does any application of this complexity.

13. Dorico desktop versions are 1/2 price until Sept 25 with no Finale ownership required, which makes it very tempting as I try to get back into playing. The ipad price is unfortunately not on sale ($120 lifetime).

    My primary use for a notation program is music minus one with early music, and to some extent learning more about the theory and notation. A few things are essential for the playing along part–breves (double whole notes) and the ability to not have barlines in particular. It’s not enough to hide barlines, you have to stop the program from making ties across even invisible barlines. There are plenty of others features that would be great to have but they’re lesser priority since I’m not setting up music for others, but for myself.

    I used Finale 1.2 a fair bit back in the day, and never loved it though I could get things done. I’ve always hated notation programs that have measures as the basic data structure because it’s so hard to deal with compared to the natural data structure of a stream of notes*, but between the death of Concertware until Dorico, that seemed to be the only choice.

    I’ve spent a fair bit of the last few days looking at ipad Sibelius a bit and Dorico much more. Sibelius seemed really awkward to use, and exceeded my patience trying to see if I could kill barlines. The more advanced version is subscription only anyway so it was easy to discard. But Dorico shows promise. It’s trivial to kill off barlines, though I was lucky to find a blog post about it. The documentation is marginal and didn’t help. It should work in the free version, though I’d already activated the 7 day free trial, so I can’t be certain yet. It has breves and even longas, though there’s an impediment to using them that I haven’t solved yet (below). I like the Dorico flows concept a lot (finally, measures are not supreme dictators!) though the mechanics will need some practice.

    I’d love to have something useful on the iPad so I can get away from the desktop more easily. But Dorico on the ipad is not really an ipad app. It’s a desktop app shoehorned onto the ipad with very little consideration for how people use ipads. The only ways to input notes are to use the virtual piano keyboard, or to attach a midi device (bluetooth or wired). There’s no way to enter a note with a finger or stylus. The virtual keyboard takes up a lot of screen space, and worse, it closes the full note panel making the breves and a bunch of other items inaccessible. I can have the note panel or the keyboard, but not both. I can change a note to a breve, but I can’t put one in from scratch. I have midi controllers, but that’s a hassle, especially my preferred cheap wind controller because it needs both hands–lots of picking it up and putting it down.

    The whole interface also assumes you have a qwerty keyboard attached and that you’re going to memorize a ton of keyboard shortcuts. You can presumably get to everything without a qwerty keyboard, but the docs aren’t always clear how and that steepens the learning curve. They really need to implement some way to use the pencil to enter notes, otherwise it’s not an escape from the office to the garden or a bus, but just YA awkward laptop with peripherals that needs a table.

    I’ve also installed the desktop version demos on my catalina mini. The installation process is ridiculous (you have to install an installer that installs the real installer), but it does make it straightforward to go back and forth between versions during the 60 day trial period to see which features work on which versions. From looking at the not nearly detailed enough version comparisons and documentation, I’ll probably buy Elements, and stick with the free ipad version. Elements has enough extra features such as musical transformations compared to the free SE to be well worth the $50 sale price. The full Pro version would be lovely to have since it seems to have enough oomph to manage most kinds of early music, but even at half price I can’t properly justify it for my dabbling. There’s some chance I’ll succumb to the temptation though, because it seems unlikely to be 1/2 price again… (Is it spending $280, or saving $280?)

    • I was spoiled first by Concertware, then by the book “Cybernetic Music” by Jaxitron**, which uses APL to implement the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. APL was ideal at the time for handling multiple streams of notes. These days, python would be a good fit.

    ** aka Jack Citron of IBM

14. This thread: the Internet I love. For my son, who has great music potential ahead of him, thank you all!

15. I have used Finele for more than 30 years, and have HATED it for all of those years. It was always a grand conglomeration of kludges. About 20% of the time I was able to get it to do what I wanted. The rest of the time was an endless struggle. Most recently, I tried to import a midi file into it and then edit it, Though the input file was in 3/4 time, I was never able to get Finale to recognize that ti was not in 4/4 time and to adjust the measures accordingly. It was always almost impossible to get Finale to do what one wanted it do do. It was obvious from the menu structure, that the whole program was a kludge of independent and non-interoperative features whose interactions had multiple bugs. I am so SO sorry that I stuck with it for all this time, and that I wasted so much time trying to get it to do what I wanted. Their kissof message admits as much. They cannot any longer maintain, or even understand, their vast spaghetti code. No doubt foolishly, and seemingly without any alternative, I have bought their recommended successor. God knows when I will ever have time to learn that new system. If I were a music professional, I would be forced to learn. As a 70-year-old amateur, frequent singing performer, and clarinet player, I don’t know if I will ever get around to it.
    Goodby, Finale. You are going to a well-diserved death.

16. I would like to add the deep regret that I have over the thousands of dollars that I have spent in “upgrades” to Finale over the years. By By, and good riddance.

17. They would need to have rewritten it long ago, as Catalina in 2019 removed all support for applications written using Carbon. One of the problems with software development is bad design decisions may leave a company with software that is too expensive to support and dropping the price wont increase the number of users sufficiently to increase revenue. Given a bit of time I could list all the statistics programs that have died. One problem has been that programs written purely for the Mac don’t have the customer base. There are only two options, either use a cross-platform framework or split into an engine and an interface, and write interfaces for each target.

18. Always sad to hear stories like this.

    Anyway, I have been using MuseScore for several years, and it’s of course free. I have issues with it, but most of them I have worked around, and I’m now quite productive with it.

    So while slightly off topic, I’m curious why people pay for Dorico or Sibelius vs using MuseScore? Looking for input from people who’ve used both.

19. That may be what got Coda, and then MakeMusic, into the swamp.

    Microsoft famously went that way with Word, which in its graphical WYSIWIG form was a Mac-first program. As Windows became a thing, they were developing in parallel. Word 6 was the first version of the application that was based on a common code base, and in the mid-1990s it was poorly received by Mac users. As I recall it looked just like Windows 95 on Macintosh, with a default blue menu bar and interface “innovations” like underscoring command shortcuts in the menus. Windows features that were harder to implement on Mac were just left out.

    It took Steve Jobs’ return and a boatload of money to get Microsoft to establish a Macintosh Business Unit, and eventually they branched off the codebase.

    In reading between the lines, I think what happened here is that MakeMusic looked at the upcoming MacOS version rollout, analyzed what it would take to keep Finale functioning vs. how many users they have, and decided it would cost less to throw in the towel and declare the application EOL.

    It’s no comfort for those of us who still use Finale, or try to use it with varying degrees of frustration, but moving that collection of code into a modern interface would be nearly impossible. I’m guessing they are not using the engine-interface model you describe.

20. I gave Dorico a preliminary spin the other day. I don’t know enough about it yet to assess how difficult it will be to move from Finale to Dorico for long-time users, but this is what I’ve learned so far:

    • Needs at least as much resources as Finale. It looks like a full installation would require 16gb of storage space, mostly for sound libraries. Even the free SE version I’m using needs about 5gb.
    • The interface looks like a modern graphic drawing program, with no modal palettes (except optionally the audio transport panel if you use it in full featured mode). Everything else sits in left or right sidebars.
    • Finale’s “Speedy Entry” mode is similar to Dorico’s note entry, but not the same. In Finale, you can use a MIDI keyboard to play a note and, while holding down the note key, press a key on your computer’s numeric keypad to enter the note with a given duration. In Dorico, you tap the duration on the keypad first, then play the pitch on the MIDI keyboard. Exactly the reverse action! Let that be a challenge…
    • It looks like lyrics are entered in a small slider window above a stave rather than a modal lyric window or in place. Lyrics had only become stable and reliable in Finale in the past 10 years or so; I will have to explore this more.
    • I had no trouble getting the MIDI keyboard to be recognized by Dorico. I did not have to take a sidetrip to the system MIDI facility (come to think of it, I’m not even sure that still exists!). I also did not have to play with three different menu items to start using MIDI. Dorico just took care of it and played sound.
    • Layout and printing are not an afterthought in Dorico. Finale was a endless series of kludgy attempts to keep up with various printing systems over the years. In Dorico, printing is straightforward and can accommodate your desired format without popping up additional dialogs.

    There is significant learning time involved here, and I’m hoping that a full version will have some customization options. Finale users are peppering Steinberg (the publisher) with agonized cries to “fix this” and “make that easier,” but I don’t believe they are yet actually using the software beyond looking at the tutorials.

    I found Finale very workable, and was able to turn out large, complicated scores, but it took lots of practice and attention to detail. I don’t think Dorico is insurmountable, and it looks like it will reward energy put into learning it.

    [Somehow “Orico” crept into an earlier edit of this post in place of “Dorico”…ick.]

21. Until last year, I hadn’t scored anything since the early 1980’s using a 3-point pen and an ink pot. I am definitely not qualified to rate or review music software, but I am curious about what people think of MuseScore relative to the commercial offerings. I needed to produce some scores for a choral music course I was taking, and while it was frustrating at first, within a day I felt fairly facile with MuseScore and (at least compared to my pen) found it amazing.

    Free is good, of course, but I’ve become a FOSS adherent not to save a few dollars on license fees, but because all too often proprietary products are discontinued or grow odious licensing terms or lose critical features. Just today, I was asked to add some photos to a web site I had developed years ago… using iWeb. Ugh.

    If I’m going to invest the time, money, and effort needed to make use of a software suite, and more specifically if I’m going to rely on it for my business, I want some sort of assurance that the software is not going to disappear or grow distasteful licensing terms after I become reliant on it. FOSS offers some of that assurance.

22. You can change that–I saw it looking for something else. Maybe a setting in the Notes toolbox? But it might need more than only that.

23. I’ve tried to make Musescore work because they do have the minimum of early music features. But in practice those are still fairly buggy and I gave up.

    Horses for courses. If the kind of music you work with fits the feature set of Musescore, that’s great. The people who pay $ or $$$ for notation software include those who either need or want professional output, need to meet specific publisher style guides, need tools e.g. to help with collapsing an orchestral score into a piano version, and/or are doing something other than mainstream music.

    Music notation is an ocean of complexities. Different instruments, places, eras, genres, can need different notations. I don’t know of any notation software that can straightforwardly set full mensural notation, let alone play it. It could be done, but there aren’t enough of us who want it for that feature to get further than a to do list. But the more professional software has enough engraving flexibility to fake much of the appearance so that humans, especially students and amateurs, can play it more easily than from either a facsimile or a translation into modern notation. Which brings up a second can of ragworms–playing what’s entered. Human players of many genres don’t play what’s written as written, so each supported style has to be included into the playback software, else it all sounds somewhere from mechanical to wrong even you’re using the sound more for error finding than for production. So many features can start trying to conflict with each other, so it takes lots of debugging. Then it all has to be documented. Unsurprisingly, a lot of that is boring, and above some level of complexity it only gets done well enough if you pay the people who do it.

24. And so you can. In a Preferences pane titled, strangely enough, “Note Input.”

    Preferences970×414 61.2 KB

    Between this and what looks like exhaustive key customization under “Key Commands,” a user could set up their system so that note entry acts exactly like Finale’s “Speedy Entry.” That would extend to the definition for each number pad duration definition.

    This would be a game-changer for all the Finale users concerned about learning an entirely new work flow. In my estimation, at least 30 percent of the work involved in engraving a score is getting the right notation in the right spots. I have 30 years of muscle memory embedded in my body, where right hand hovers over the number keypad and left hand plays pitches on a MIDI keyboard. (I even purchased an auxiliary number keypad for a PowerBook 165 back in the day to help with this.)

    YMMV on the workflow percentage.