Finale Forum

I have a ton of Finale 2012 files saved since that is the version I've been using... however I'm wondering if I will be able to open these files if I update to a newer version of Finale. Thanks for any input

Welcome to the forum!

Fortunately the Finale file format is backwards compatible.
“Backwards compatible” means that newer Finale versions can open Finale documents created in older Finale versions.

In Other Words:
If you update to a newer Finale version (possibly v27?), then this newer version can open your saved v2012 documents.
To open the v2012 documents you may (or may not) have to change the file format extension from .mus to .musx.
Then the newer version will open the documents.
When the newer version is saving the documents, it will save them in the newer version’s .musx file format.

On The Other Hand, the (older) Finale v2012 can not open documents saved in a later Finale version (= saved in the .musx file format).
But from the newer Finale version you can export documents to the Finale 2012 .mus file format (also called the “legacy” format).

Unfortunately it's not as easy as getting a new version of Microsoft Word or Quicken, say. There can be some subtle differences when opening an old file. I know the version that introduced stacked articulations can make a mess of an old file, though there is apparently a setting that tries to fix it.

Depending on your music it may or may not be easy to proofread. Rather than risk something getting by me that I fail to catch, I choose to keep old versions of Finale around and if I have to make little changes to old files I use the version they were created with. Fortunately, this is possible with Windows. I don't update nearly ever time, so this amounts to 2005b, 2011, and 2014.5. (I bought v. 26 but never installed it; I bought v. 27 and plan to install it at some point when I have a lot of free time.)

One of these days, I suppose, Windows will require everything to be 64-bit, so this may not work forever.