25.5 released today.

[BuonTempi]

MM have released the latest update, which is mostly aimed at improving stability on the latest Mac OS, as well as fixing some Windows crashes.

Most importantly for me is the implementation of a CLEAR key on short Mac keyboards!!! Woohoo!!!!

https://www.finalemusic.com/blog/finale ... clear-key/

[motet]

Are users of older versions (2014.5 and previous) out of luck on High Sierra?

[BuonTempi]

2011 doesn't work at all. With 2012 and 2014.5, you may, or may not, run into a variety of problems, but there won't be patches for them.

Finale 25 was released in August 2016, and has seen more updates than any previous version for at least the last 12 years. It will be interesting to see how the program develops from hereon, in place of the old annual/biannual cycle.

[whrcomposer]

Hi all, first post here, but good to see so many familiar faces from the defunct forums at the MakeMusic site. Glad to see another update for Finale 25 available, particularly with support for High Sierra (I've not taken the plunge yet, but I plan to do so soon).

But doesn't it seem like all of the functional improvements in the last several updates have been focused around MusicXML? I know MusicXML is crucial for converting files for SmartMusic, but when do the rest of us get some improvements to the things that we've been waiting for?

Best,
-WR

[BuonTempi]

I agree that it would be great to see some significant revisions to major aspects of the program, along the lines of the Selection Tool UI in 2008; the Expressions framework in 2009 (remember the fury that caused!); Lyrics, Staves and Chords in subsequent versions.

I'd like to see Articulations and Repeats overhauled, possibly borrowing from Expressions concepts of categories. Needless to say, improving Finale's handling of collisions -- Slurs and artics; lyrics and low notes -- would be a huge timesaver. And of course, full support for SMuFL fonts.

I'd hope that MM have done enough work on the "internals" to start offering something more tangible on the external. But as ever, we won't know until it's released.

[N Grossingink]

…the Selection Tool UI in 2008; the Expressions framework in 2009

For me, these were major improvements to Finale and really the last 2 improvements I use on a per-engraving job basis. All of the others, like the clunky Staff Tool and Score Manager, I've learned to put up with.

Give me my stacking Articulations, for starters. I'd wager that has been asked for most of the years Finale has been in existance.

N.

[motet]

What do Mac users do about old files? I have Finale files going Bach to 2005. I could open them with the latest version, but considerable cleanup would be required. If I just want to fix a minor mistake, being able to run the old version on Windows makes that very easy.

[BuonTempi]

What do Mac users do about old files? I have Finale files going Bach to 2005. I could open them with the latest version, but considerable cleanup would be required. If I just want to fix a minor mistake, being able to run the old version on Windows makes that very easy.

What clean up do you find necessary? I open old files in new versions if I need to make amendments; in which case I'm going to check the entire document and make a variety of changes. However, generally there's no clean up required -- though my scores are less complex than some. My oldest files are from the mid 90s, and I can open them in F25 and they are the same as they were. (which is not very good....!)

[motet]

I remember subtle differences, but I just tried it and it looks pretty good. Hmm, It would be nice to get rid of the old version.

[miker]

The only issue I’ve had with 25 is crashes, and they seem to have addressed a number of crash-causing issues. Whether mine are in there remains to be seen, but I’m certainly looking forward to working with the new version.

[BuonTempi]

All of the others, like the clunky Staff Tool and Score Manager, I've learned to put up with.

The change to the Staff Tool was a major boon to my productivity. In conjunction with Edit > Select Region (or Jari's Expand Region PI), I find it so much easier to assign groups, respace and hide staves than before, with none of that tedious "optimize staves" nonsense.
Admittedly, like many of Finale's implementations, it's not perfect, and there are things that are more difficult than previously. Hopefully, those things are less commonly used for most people than the things that are now easier.

The Chord Tool improvements let me add bass figures on beats, which is a massive time saver, compared to fiddling about with hidden notes.

But of course Finale 2011 is seven years ago, and in the face of Dorico, Finale needs some new improvements that are going to do more of the work for people. However, any time Finale does stuff automatically, there's someone who doesn't want it to do that....

[Vaughan]

Motet, I have .mus files which were made in v. 3.2 and they still open fine in Finale 25. My only problems have to do with missing or renamed fonts and expression categories (it's very time-consuming to move things from the Miscellaneous category to where they could better be) as well as dealing with the limitations of Finale in the early 90's and my own inexperience at the time. As far as fonts are concerned, my only 'insurmountable' problem is with the occasional file in which a tempo marking appears as Chinese characters, and I hadn't made PDFs or hardcopies at the time, meaning I have no way of knowing what was there originally.

Other than this, I'm one of the lucky ones for whom Finale 25 works very well. Having said this, I'm following Dorico's evolution closely, as there are still far too many time-consuming operations I have to do manually in Finale which should no longer be necessary and which have already been considered and intelligently implemented in Dorico.

[MikeHalloran]

Are users of older versions (2014.5 and previous) out of luck on High Sierra?

It works the same for me as it did over Sierra. Some functionality is compromised like the palette resize issue but is otherwise ok.

I had 2014.5 installed and updated the OS but I understand it won’t install over 10.13. 25 has had two subsequent releases that deal with installation over High Sierra.

2011 will not work at all and APFS doesn’t make a difference. I skipped 2012 so I don’t know.

It is expected that none of the 32 bit versions will work next year when OS 10.14 is released. Apple has pretty much promised this.

[MikeHalloran]

What do Mac users do about old files? I have Finale files going Bach to 2005. I could open them with the latest version, but considerable cleanup would be required. If I just want to fix a minor mistake, being able to run the old version on Windows makes that very easy.

What clean up do you find necessary? I open old files in new versions if I need to make amendments; in which case I'm going to check the entire document and make a variety of changes. However, generally there's no clean up required -- though my scores are less complex than some. My oldest files are from the mid 90s, and I can open them in F25 and they are the same as they were. (which is not very good....!)

Same here.

My only real issue with old files is that the first versions required the separate purchase of Sonata font from Adobe. Later, there were other included fonts that don’t like modern Macs. Substituting current fonts solves the problem about 100% of the time. I suspect that my ease of use stems from the fact that I’ve never used 3rd party fonts in Finale.

I have a very large score that I did n 1998 that’s been my test file for every new release. I keep an old G4 running OS 9 in case I ever wanted to open it in 1998 again as I did to test the current print to .pdf issue on the other forum.

[Jay Emmes]

Just a note of caution:
With the first boot of this update I chose to save the preferences ("File"-menu command), which resulted in having lost all preferences with the second boot.

Oh, and the Garritan Instruments for Finale? Finale can't find them anymore.

The app never ceases to amaze me.

[BuonTempi]

With the first boot of this update I chose to save the preferences ("File"-menu command), which resulted in having lost all preferences with the second boot.

Second boot? Or launch of the app? Are your prefs currently still not saved? Might be an idea to check the modification date of the pref file, and/or trash it, then try saving the prefs again. Or see if Time Machine has a suitable backup.
<User>/Library/Preferences/com.makemusic.finale.fprf

Oh, and the Garritan Instruments for Finale? Finale can't find them anymore.

Find where the sample actually are on the disk. Recent installations have favoured /Users/Shared, rather than the /Applications directory of old.
Then check the path stored in /Library/Preferences/com.Garritan.Instruments for Finale.plist. (NB: root level Library, not User library.)

Amend if necessary to something like:

Code: Select all

<key>sample_dir</key>
	<string>/Users/Shared/GIFF_Samples</string>

The app never ceases to amaze me.

Search the forums of just about any complex application, and you will find people having a bunch of problems that vary between unique, rare, and commonplace. Some people have the darnedest problems with Photoshop that some others just don't.

[MikeHalloran]

Oh, and the Garritan Instruments for Finale? Finale can't find them anymore.

You did run the latest Garritan/Aria installer, right?

If you don't, every time, Finale cannot find GIFF.

If you didn't, rerun both installers.

[MikeHalloran]

Anyway, no problems here.

[motet]

I'm glad to hear the Mac version is better now. I was pretty worried they would lose a lot of customers--people were pretty pissed off for a while. To MM's defense, the Mac OS seems to be a moving target.

[MikeHalloran]

I'm glad to hear the Mac version is better now. I was pretty worried they would lose a lot of customers--people were pretty pissed off for a while. To MM's defense, the Mac OS seems to be a moving target.

Not really. Apple announced the development path years ago. They didn’t go as quickly as announced, that’s all. Yosemite was to have been 64 bit only—instead, that was pushed back 4 years.

Btw, Finale 2012 was originally announced to be 64 bit but it wasn’t as we all know (but why was never made known). Had 2014 been 64 bit, the incompatibilities with Yosemite, El Cap and Sierra would have been avoided — that should never have been a surprise to MM. so, 5 years later, we have Finale 25 with the growing pains that should have occurred 3–5 years earlier.

Though they’ve always been a few years behind, Microsoft is moving in the same direction. Like 16 bit before it, 32 bit will be dropped from Windows eventually. As it is, the rollout of Win 10 is a clown car compared to anything that Apple has done (we can leave the Scully years out of this). As secretive as Apple is, MS plays much closer to the vest in this regard. I don’t know if the recent loss to Amazon of the guy who wrote the code that became NT (he also wrote the first search engine) is going to slow this down in any way — probably not.

[BuonTempi]

To MM's defense, the Mac OS seems to be a moving target.

Apple does change things, but they usually give developers YEARS of notice. Users don't see those warnings, of course, so they blame Apple when their software "suddenly" doesn't work on the new OS.

Of course, sometimes MacOS itself has bugs that cause problems, in which case the developer needs to decide whether to issue a workaround for the time being or wait till Apple fixes it.

[Peter Thomsen]

… Btw, Finale 2012 was originally announced to be 64 bit but it wasn’t as we all know (but why was never made known) …

My guess is that Finale 2012’s Unicode support (no small undertaking) took so many resources, that the transition to 64 bit were postponed to a later Finale version.

[motet]

Microsoft may play close to the vest, but yet, programs written a decade and more ago still work on Windows versions that were not even dreamed of a decade ago, much less announced to developers. I have stuff I still use that was written in 2001. The difference is that MS puts in the extra effort to keep things backwardly compatible--it's possible to do! You make that part of the development process. I am a software engineer, so I know what's involved. Windows and MacOS are based on the same hardware, so there's no excuse there.

Apple's philosophy, on the other hand is, "let them upgrade their software if it doesn't work. We warned the developers!" I'm not talking about a major change such as from 32-bit to 64-bit. I'm talking about scroll bars disappearing, things suddenly crashing, hanging, or running inexplicably slowly, all of which I've seen Finale users complain about over the years, especially the past 5 or so. Even when the OS change is a minor one. It's not just Finale--all software running on Apple platforms suffers from this. I suspect some of the breakages were unforeseen by Apple; a "keep it compatible and make sure old things still work" philosophy on their part would have prevented it.

If you have an expensive piece of software like Finale or an office suite, you may not want to shell out hundreds of dollars to upgrade something that is working fine for you, yet you may want some other app that only works with the latest Mac OS. Even if you have deep pockets, it's always traditionally something of a chore getting used to a new version of Finale, something you might not want to devote time to if you're in the middle of a project.

Windows 10 may well be a clown car. I haven't upgraded--there's no need to, since virtually any software available for Windows will work back to at least Windows 7.

Anyway, my point was that I'm glad Finale works well on the Mac now. I saw some VERY pissed-off users in the old forums last year, and losing the Mac platform would have certainly doomed Finale, which nobody wants. As long as you're willing to keep on top of the latest version of everything, I'm sure it's fine.

[Michel R E]

So other than the one person saying that Finale 25.5 couldn't find the GIfF library on their computer, are there any others who've upgraded and have had no issues (or have had issues) with libraries other than GIfF, like full GPO5.

I don't let the programs install willy-nilly where they want. I have all my libraries on a separate disk partition.

[Jay Emmes]

I didn't have any problems with the previous updates on Finale 25, but this one seems to have deleted or replaced the preferences file (why?) and therewith (?) the path to Garritan. Easily enough repaired with a Time Machine restore, sure enough, but a nuisance nonetheless.