MM Feature requests

[OCTO]

Dear friends,

I visited several times last months the new MM Zendesk, and particularly the Feature Requests.

A question to some of you who are the beta testers: have any of these requests been implemented?

MM makes it actually worse. The old forum was perhaps a place for feature requests, now they have it separated into one long forum where it is clear how many reqests are prioritized and done by MM. A very very few. Requests are "answered", it means not implemented.

Some are "completed" but - when: the all of them are just clarifications (for instance it is a feature the user didn't know for - falsely called "completed"). No one is actually "completed".

And than, it is "planned". All these FIN-XXXX are - what?

Some answers are "this can be done by plug-in", yet not exactly.

I feel helpless. I have no idea where MM is going.

[BuonTempi]

A question to some of you who are the beta testers: have any of these requests been implemented?

Beta testers are under a Non Disclosure Agreement. They can't tell you what's in pre-release software.

And than, it is "planned". All these FIN-XXXX are - what?

Those are reference numbers for the bug or request. For MM to fix the bugs or implement the features, they need to organise them, before "triage" -- how severe, how important, how difficult?

I have to say that I don't go to the MM forum at all. But I do find the company receptive and willing to make improvements. Their commitment to continued free updates is very welcome. But things take time, and they can't do everything at once.

Have you moved up to Finale 25, now that Jari's plug-ins are available? I'm finding it very fast, very stable and very productive.

[MikeHalloran]

Where are they going? The blog helps and should be checked now and then. As MM readies a new version, there will be plenty of 'heads up' posts.

http://www.finalemusic.com/blog/

Other than that, we know that MM needs to fix Windows licenses to be compatible with Win10 and they're working on it. We also know that MM is working on supporting SMuFL fonts and making Maestro compatible.

[Knut]

I do agree that it's somewhat difficult to say where MM is going at the moment, but to be fair, most of the posts on the Feature request forum have been answered one way or the other. Some are set to 'planned', which means that the feature is part of the roadmap, while most are merely 'answered' and logged for future reference.

Except for what Mike has already pointed out, the answers on the official forum give a strong impression that MM is hard at work modernizing the code further, which hopefully will result in a more stable application set up for swifter feature implementation in future. Besides that, better text implementation seems to be a very high priority, which includes support for SMuFL fonts, OpenType features and none-integer (floating point) font sizes. Overhauls of the shape designer and chord tool seems also to be part of the roadmap.

I have no idea how far along any of these improvements are, but the Finale blog is likely going to be where new features will be announced ahead of any new release.

[ebiggs1]

My take on MM right now is bug swatting. New features are not put at a high priority.
What really bothers me is how far ahead Sibelius is getting. I have been using Finale for far too many years to start learning a new program.

[BuonTempi]

What really bothers me is how far ahead Sibelius is getting.

Really? From what I hear (though I admit I don't follow it closely) development of Sibelius is pretty much dead after they sacked the UK Dev team. The Dorico forum is filled with disgruntled and disaffected Sib users.

Let's not forget that Finale 25 came out less than a year ago. MM have promised a series of free updates, but it's obvious that while some of the team is working on that, some others will be working on the next version, whenever that will be. Finale has always been a product of evolution, not revolution. Extrapolating the features of the past, we can expect some more streamlining of the tools and simplifying of the UI. SmuFl support will bring some improvements to layout.

[ebiggs1]

Really? From what I hear (though I admit I don't follow it closely) development of Sibelius...

Yes, really ! You may insert the word Dorico if you like but Dorico isn't at the level of Sib,...yet. D/l the Sib demo.

[miker]

Interesting that you should say that, Ron. Since Jari came through for us, and I was able to get my favorite plugins, I've switched to F25. It's only been a couple of days, but not once have I experienced "Finale has encountered a problem and quit..."

In addition, beginning playback with HP enabled is now instant, rather than waiting for it to process.

Granted, my needs are simple compared to most users, but so far, I like it!

[OCTO]

I have been using Finale for far too many years to start learning a new program.

Yes, me too.
I am highly dependent of any kind of very well functioning notation software. I am a freelance composer and publisher.
My last use of Finale had really impacted my schedule. About +30% of time was pure re-editing of the things that Finale doesn't do per se, or it makes changes after I corrected the things. It is a huge amount of time if you take a very, very large orchestral score with vocal parts. Sometimes I feel it is an endless moving of things around.. Constant collisions, jumping accents, re-spaced systems, optical spacing and kerning are re-set, lasso-looking slurs, objects missing or misplaced in PDF... name it.

Just some reminders:
People were asking to implement unicode since beginning of 2000, it was introduced 2012.
Linked parts were in Igor Engraver in 2001, Notator in late '80, Mosaic in late '90, in Finale 2007. Only MuseScore implemented that feature after Finale.
Attached hairpins are introduced in 2014, when all other software had that from the start.

Finale's the most deep problem is in automatic making collisions, re-doing what is done, and lack of correct spacing (kerning and optical spacing).
Instead of further developing of technologies, they remove some of them (video, scanning).

In this advanced time of robust and intelligent software including handwriting recognition, automatisation, "AI" tools for fixing the errors, technologies even found in a 'simple' devices such as mobile phones, I really don't see the future of Finale. When I read that they organise competition for young composers (only young and only in US), instead of organising competition in "AI for notation development", I am deeply sad that I am perhaps forced to abandon Finale completely in the close future.

[BuonTempi]

I'm sure there are other areas where Finale was among the first.

As for collisions: generally, Finale lays out the music pretty well. The important thing is to lock systems once they are to your satisfaction. I've also been experimenting with the Vertical Collision Remover, and using it just to add space where staves collide, it works quite well.

Jumping Accents is certainly a worry: mostly, these are corrected by a redraw, and improved settings of the Articulations can ameliorate matters. The list of things that get changed by Automatic Music Spacing is small, and MM is keen to fix that.

Someone pointed out that increasing the Minimum Distance between items (or reducing it!) can improve collisions in tightly packed areas, in addition to adjusting the Music Spacing settings.

Are you using Finale 25 now? As Mike says, it's stable, fast, and does have a number of notation bug fixes. For me, Finale is a familiar tool, and I know how to get the best out of it, to do what I need to do. I dare say I could use another app, but I would probably be learning not only new methods and practices, but new problems and workarounds too.

[OCTO]

Are you using Finale 25 now? As Mike says, it's stable, fast, and does have a number of notation bug fixes. For me, Finale is a familiar tool, and I know how to get the best out of it, to do what I need to do. I dare say I could use another app, but I would probably be learning not only new methods and practices, but new problems and workarounds too.

What does Finale 25 bring to me? Only the costs. If Finale 2014.5 is terribly slow it is not reason to pay to get it not slow. If you buy a brand new car and it has brake pressed down, so you go and pay for the new car to get it released? I don't see any point of this. I am also dependent of copyists, here all of them need to upgrade.
If I will buy a new version, it will be only when couple of new features are introduced. Their earlier logic of backward incompatibility and yearly upgrades has killed the creative development, in my opinion.

But I see the feature list just growing and giving them numbers. I have a feeling that this is a place just to release the pressure.

[Michel R E]

No, Finale 25 is faster than ALL previous releases. It's a huge difference in regard to any previous version.

[BuonTempi]

Everyone loves a car analogy.
If you buy a car, use it for a few years, and the maker will, for a fraction of the price, give you a new model that goes faster, with better fuel economy, isn't that a good thing? And you get to keep the old car!
Or do you think the company should make improvements to your existing car, for ever, for no money?

Plenty of people regularly posted on the old forum "No new features! Just bug fixes!". MM listens to them, starts fixing the bugs (as well as modernizing the entire codebase), and now it's "No more bug fixes! I want features!".

The old forum was perhaps a place for feature requests.

The old forum was NEVER a place for requesting MM to implement new features. It was a user forum, maintained by MM. The only way to request a feature was through Submitting a Support Request.

it is clear how many reqests are prioritized and done by MM. A very very few. Requests are "answered", it means not implemented.

MM cannot, and should not, be expected to implement every request. They make software for as many people as is economical: not tailor-made to each user.

As always, you have four choices:

1. Continue to use an older version; accept its limitations, and get on with your work.
2. Pay for the latest version; enjoy its benefits, and engage with the company constructively about future improvements.
3. Move to a competing product (and then choose option 1 or 2 again).
4. Write your own software. I regularly hear people say "it should be easy to implement x,y,z".

I'm not quite sure what it is you want.

[Knut]

No, Finale 25 is faster than ALL previous releases. It's a huge difference in regard to any previous version.

Not for me.

As far as I can remember, Finale 2007 and 2011 were both more responsive than Finale 25, although some versions did contain a lot more bugs. Pre-OSX versions like Finale 2003 was faster still. Mind you, I'm not concerned with playback.

Compared to the terrible performance of 2014 and 2014.5, agree that Finale 25 is a huge improvement, though.

That being said, Dorico and, to my knowledge, Sibelius aren't much better than Finale 25 with regard to performance.

Plenty of people regularly posted on the old forum "No new features! Just bug fixes!". MM listens to them, starts fixing the bugs (as well as modernizing the entire codebase), and now it's "No more bug fixes! I want features!".

That's the way it goes. Finale was extremely buggy for a number of years, so of course user's would want those to be prioritized when it was clear that MM didn't have the resources to do it all at once. With Finale 25 most of the bugs are gone, but competition has increased, inspiring requests for new features. Perfectly natural if you ask me.

[ebiggs1]

Does MM have it's own programmers? I heard one time they hire out the programming. So, it only happens a few times year? If that is true and I really don't know, it could be why 'bug' fixes and feature requests take so long. Any clue?

The seemingly rambling way Finale decides where to put things like expressions and articulations, etc, can drive me nuts. Or possibly more nuts! I don't do huge score mostly for local groups and the school district so I sympathize with some of you guys. I had a piece just yesterday where I changed a few notes to a rest. Finale left the accent mark on the rest! Tie across a bar line with an accidental doesn't carry through. Looks OK but doesn't play back OK. That type stuff.

[Knut]

There is no way on this planet that Finale 2007 and 2011 were "more responsive" than F25. They were very limited in the physical address space they could address. Loading a full orchestra in F25 is almost instantaneous, whereas in previous versions it could take 3-5 minutes to load a full orchestra. Click "play" and playback starts immediately--not after you've gone to fetch a cup of coffee. I recall clearly that creating an audio file could take so long that people would interrupt it, thinking something had gone wrong and then scream "bug" because the audio file was incomplete. What "terrible" performance issues were there in F2014 and F2014.5? I never experienced them--and I use Finale for 3-4 hours every day.

As for "bugs" almost every "bug" I saw reported was a failure on the user's part to understand and use the product the way it was intended. As soon as many people run into a difficulty they start yelling "bug!" instead of stirring their lazy asses to do a bit of investigation on what they should be doing instead.

Needless to say, I am tired of this constant carping about fathom "bugs" and nostalgia for out-dated software.

Then let me say that I'm tired of the overzealous loyalty to MakeMusic and forum members misreading my posts.

But seriously, you need to keep two things in mind:
1. We are not on the same platform. There have been a lot more performance issues with Mac than Windows versions of Finale post-OSX. This seems to be true for the number of bugs as well.

2. I explicitly said I wasn't concerned with the performance of playback. Of course, currently available hardware far surpasses what was available almost 10 years ago, so it goes without saying that playback performance has been improved as a result. This may of course also be the result of skilled software programming, although I highly doubt that it's the more important factor.

[David Ward]

I can certainly confirm many of OCTO's difficulties with F 2014.5, especially slow response to everything when dealing with large scores on many staves, including multiple vocal lines, heavily divided strings &c.

I have now, ahead of schedule (see my post in another thread), installed Mac Sierra on two computers and aim to download and install F 25 soon (maybe but not necessarily as soon as 1 or 2 April). Whatever the outcome, I hope to persevere with Finale - like others, I feel a bit too old to want to learn new music typesetting software… (And I remain fluent with manuscript, even for very large scores).

BTW, installing Sierra, including the 10.12.3 up-date, took five and a half hours on my desktop, and three hours on my MacBook with SSD. Is this normal? There is plenty of free HD space and adequate memory on both, but my broadband is not the fastest.

[BuonTempi]

BTW, installing Sierra, including the 10.12.3 up-date, took five and a half hours on my desktop, and three hours on my MacBook with SSD. Is this normal? There is plenty of free HD space and adequate memory on both, but my broadband is not the fastest.

Are you talking about downloading and installing? The full downloader may take hours, depending on your connection, but the actually install, particularly on an SSD should take c. 20 minutes.

Does MM have it's own programmers? I heard one time they hire out the programming. So, it only happens a few times year?

Yes, MM has a team of developers, who work every day. It may be that the only evidence you see of their work is a release every few months, but that doesn't mean they only work on release day.

[David Ward]

… … Are you talking about downloading and installing? The full downloader may take hours, depending on your connection, but the actually install, particularly on an SSD should take c. 20 minutes.… …

I think (not sure) the first version of Sierra had been downloaded (but not installed) automatically to both computers a while ago, without any active intervention from me. However, downloading the 10.12.3 up-date was certainly part of the operation which I timed over all. With the spinning HD on the MacMini installing stuck at ‘about 33 minutes remaining’ for over half an hour and then slowly, very slowly, became less. With the SSD on the MacBook ‘about 28 minutes remaining’ did seem to mean roughly what it said.

[motet]

A reminder to those who are saying, "Finale works great for me. Those who complain about performance/bugs/missing features are full of it." Finale runs on two different platforms and several different versions of the operating system on each. But more importantly, there's a huge variety in what people are doing. Some people are carefully crafting playback to achieve a realistic performance; others don't care about playback at all. Some people are writing for large symphony orchestra; others are writing for mixed chorus, or marching band, or jazz combo. Some write 50-measure songs; others write 4,000-measure operas. Some people enter music with a MIDI keyboard; others use the mouse or QWERTY entry. Some people write avant-garde pieces with notational challenges; others write in the common-practice style. Simple entry; Speedy entry. Etc.; etc.

I don't care how long you have been using Finale--you can't know what other people's experience is like. To argue that your experience is the one true one and that everyone else is mistaken or doing something wrong strikes me as arrogant and not very helpful.

[MikeHalloran]

My take on MM right now is bug swatting. New features are not put at a high priority.
What really bothers me is how far ahead Sibelius is getting. I have been using Finale for far too many years to start learning a new program.

Those who believe that Sibelius is ahead or that Dorico is anywhere near ready... well, knock yourselves out. No thanks!

Generally-speaking the Windows port went fairly smoothly with some glitches users never saw. The Mac port, on the other hand, presented major problems that are still being ironed out.

Really? I would have guessed the opposite from the nature of the complaints.

[Knut]

I don't care how long you have been using Finale--you can't know what other people's experience is like. To argue that your experience is the one true one and that everyone else is mistaken or doing something wrong strikes me as arrogant and not very helpful.

Indeed!

[motet]

An illustration of that is the Finale beta testing. Despite beta testing, there are always bugs discovered by the end users within a day or two after the new version is released to the public, and often they are by no means subtle. It's not that the beta testers are to blame--they use Finale how they always use Finale. It's rather that they don't and can't represent all the ways that Finale is used.

(MM QA staff, however, could do a better job by systematically testing every function of every tool and plug-in, something a beta tester would not do. Sometimes it appears that no one has even tried a particular button or plug-in.)

[MikeHalloran]

BTW, installing Sierra, including the 10.12.3 up-date, took five and a half hours on my desktop, and three hours on my MacBook with SSD. Is this normal? There is plenty of free HD space and adequate memory on both, but my broadband is not the fastest.

Are you talking about downloading and installing? The full downloader may take hours, depending on your connection, but the actually install, particularly on an SSD should take c. 20 minutes...

I've a little side business where I take care of over 30 Macs besides the ones in my house. The average install of Sierra on an SSD was just a bit over 20 minutes.

To save time, I would start the download — this lets the App Store know — then halt it. I'd copy over a zipped copy of the full download onto the desktop, expand and run it from there. It's important that, if you use an installer from another Mac, that the file be zipped first and expanded on the new machine. Otherwise, the new Mac may not have privileges to run the installer.

[FergusMac]

I don't care how long you have been using Finale--you can't know what other people's experience is like. To argue that your experience is the one true one and that everyone else is mistaken or doing something wrong strikes me as arrogant and not very helpful.

How is this helpful? Some people do use Finale trouble-free for years. Does that mean they should keep quiet?