Version 26 released

[motet]

https://www.scoringnotes.com/reviews/finale-26-review/

[Bill Reed]

I was hoping the good sneak peaks were yet to come.. Oh well...

[John Ruggero]

For me, MakeMusic has labored and brought forth a mouse.

[MikeHalloran]

Check your reseller!

Sweetwater has it @ $119. MakeMusic Finale - Upgrade from Previous Version (download)
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... n-download

Guitar Center also has it @ $119 but is still calling it an upgrade to Finale 25. I'd wait till the description changes before I follow that link but I see a 15% coupon code.
https://www.guitarcenter.com/Makemusic/ ... Upgrade.gc

Musicians Friend is the same as GC but without the coupon code
https://www.musiciansfriend.com/search? ... le+upgrade

In both cases, the competitive upgrade is the same price.

If you go this route, you will be emailed a link and a code. The link takes you to makemusic.com where you log into (or create) your account. You'll then enter the qualifying license (old Finale or competitor). This will register 26 and let you download the purchased version which you'll authorize in the normal fashion.

When I did it two years ago, the Chrome browser gave me validation errors. I then tried FireFox and it worked (as did Safari and IE for others). Some have to disable VPN or firewalls temporarily to make this work—once authorized, you can put them back in place.

[zuill]

None of those links are for Finale 26. I would avoid them unless they say Finale 26.

Zuill

[Vaughan]

I just went through the MM website to download the upgrade to Finale 26 and, while I'm willing to pay the euro equivalent of $149, why should I have to pay more than $31 sales tax to the US government?

[Gareth Green]

I just went through the MM website to download the upgrade to Finale 26 and, while I'm willing to pay the euro equivalent of $149, why should I have to pay more than $31 sales tax to the US government?

Likewise. I would have liked to download and install immediately, but I'm going to wait until the UK distributor offers it (usually several weeks after release - never understood why) to see how the price compares.

[Gareth Green]

... I'm going to wait until the UK distributor offers it (usually several weeks after release - never understood why) to see how the price compares.

I hereby eat my words; just got the upgrade email from AlfredMusic(UK) - £99 - equivalent to c.$130.

Don't know whether you can buy it from there, Vaughan?

[David Ward]

Yes, I just got that e-mail from AlfredMusic(UK) too. I might not have looked at it properly had in not been for your post here, so thanks for that.

[Vaughan]

I found an address here in Holland where I can buy it. The price in euros is the same as the US price + US sales tax, but the difference is that if I buy it here, I can deduct the Dutch tax. I still think it's strange that they charge US sales tax for an item which is being sold to a foreign country.

[MikeHalloran]

There's no such thing as "US Sales Tax". There may be an EU tariff being called that.

[motet]

They shouldn't be collecting sales tax from you. In the U.S. you pay tax according to where you live, since each state and even each municipality have their own sales tax rates. The federal government does not tax sales.

Up to now, if you bought something online from another state, with a few exceptions sales tax was not collected. Technically you were supposed to report and pay the tax yourself on your state income tax return but nobody did that, and a few months ago the U.S. Supreme Court decided that tax should be collected by the merchant on all online sales according to where the buyer lives, and paid by the merchant to the state.

$31 on a $149 purchase is over 20%, much higher than any state's tax rate. It sounds like maybe that's Amsterdam's 21% VAT.

[Vaughan]

When I went through the whole rigamarole on MM's website, they listed the $149 price and in addition there was a field for US Sales Tax. I would have provided a screen shot of the window but I can no longer reproduce it because now the website is saying that I don't have any upgrade authorisations. MM already responded that I need to get an authorisation code from the seller here. We'll see...

[David Ward]

This is what I get on the MM site. UK standard VAT is at 20%, which comes to $29.80, so I think that's what the tax shown is: UK VAT. I presume that if I buy it directly from the MM site, there will be no problem with authorization codes, as my serial number seems to be showing automatically a little above what is in the screenshot. Whether or not this would be the case if I were to buy via Alfred Music, I don't know.

Either way, I usually wait a bit (at least a week or two, maybe longer) before actually buying an up-grade, so I am not yet in a tearing hurry.

[Gareth Green]

I presume that if I buy it directly from the MM site, there will be no problem with authorization codes, as my serial number seems to be showing automatically a little above what is in the screenshot. Whether or not this would be the case if I were to buy via Alfred Music, I don't know.

I have bought (from AlfredUK), downloaded, installed and authorised v26 today with no issues at all. The order confirmation email from Alfred comes with a download link and an authorisation code.

The authorisation process was actually simpler and quicker than I remember from previous versions.

[motet]

Maybe they collect VAT for electronic deliveries since it doesn't go through customs?

[Bill Reed]

If sales tax is the most compelling thing to talk about it doesn't say much for the value of the upgrade...

[miker]

I have an email in to Sweetwater, asking for clarification on the pricing.

[smw_brighton]

Any bug fixes are always welcome with a new release - and it's great that Mac users are getting some dedicated fixes this time (although being a Windows user these are of no interest to me). I have already expressed my opinion on MakeMusic charging for what I think should be a maintenance release (even though I understand the need to earn income between major releases ), but having been a heavy-duty Finale user since purchasing v3.7, I still feel a certain amount of loyalty to a product that has served me well for two decades - albeit via many work-arounds to long-standing bugs sourced from forums such as this one.

However, having read two online v26 reviews (http://www.rpmseattle.com/of_note/final ... 26-review/ and https://www.scoringnotes.com/reviews/finale-26-review/), it seems that if I load a v25 (or earlier) file into v26, and click NO when asked whether I want to "update articulations and remove manual adjustments", Finale will do it anyway - resulting in the removal of all manual adjustments, and every articulation being in a different position the next time it is re-loaded into an earlier version of the software. According to a quote in one of the reviews (from MakeMusic’s Notation Products Manager) this is not a bug, but by design: "This came up several times during the development cycle, and each time we made the decision to continue moving forward with the new features, but it was not a choice that we took lightly".

I have to ask myself how many people at MakeMusic actually use their product? The thought of hours of painstaking manual articulation adjustments in all my scores being removed/undone the moment I load them into v26 (due to the software deliberately ignoring my request) totally puts me off upgrading. I realise that the effects of this will only be apparent when loading them back into an earlier version - but I work with several people who are still on 2014.5, so this issue is a very real one for me.

[David Ward]

I understood from Scoring Notes (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that any articulations added or adjusted in F 26 when a F 25 (or earlier) file is opened in F 26 are liable to display with wrong positions when opened in 25 or earlier, but that articulations that have not been added or changed while open in F 26 will still look as they were.

Perhaps we should remember that until recently one could not open a file created in a later version of Finale in any earlier version other than by going the Music XML route.

[smw_brighton]

Under the title Older documents - and a word of caution (in the Scoring Notes review) it states:

One big caveat: When Finale v26 opens an older document and you have told it to not update the articulations, strictly speaking, it doesn’t obey your wishes. Behind the scenes, for stacking articulations, the Stack automatically setting in the articulation’s definition is checked anyway, but then all the current articulations in the document are set to Stack > Never so that their current position is retained. This means that any future articulations that you place will stack automatically — which could be problematic if you intend to continue working on this file with someone using v25.

And a paragraph later:

I asked Mark Adler, MakeMusic’s director of production and senior editor, about articulation behavior when opening earlier files. He said, “We had many discussions regarding this behavior. In adding this functionality to Finale, it became necessary for Finale to use a different calculation for positioning articulations. So, while you can update an old file to v26 and choose not to update articulation positioning for those markings already in the document, Finale does update the file to use the new positioning calculation to accommodate your choice. Once you save the file, the new positioning data based on that new frame of reference is saved — this is why the new positioning data is not recognized when that file is subsequently opened in an older version. We felt that it was in our users’ best interest to continue to allow opening of v26 files in older versions even though articulation positioning data is lost when moving a file backward.”

[Michel R E]

It seems clear: this "issue" with articulation stacking only applies if you are transferring a file back and forth from v26 to v25 and back. I can see this being an issue for those who need to collaborate with another Finale user who has not upgraded, I guess.
For me, this doesn't affect me at all. I never send Finale files to anyone.
And I always duplicate all my files in a new folder for each version of Finale I install (for example, there exists a folder with my 2nd symphony in a directory for Finale 2012, then one for Finale 2014.5, and one for Finale 25. And there will be a new folder for Finale 26 when I finally install it.)

[michelp]

Important info :
Finale 26 is compatible with :
• Windows 7 SP1/Windows 8 or 8.1/Windows 10 (64-bit only)
• Mac : macOS 10.12 Sierra, 10.13 High Sierra and 10.14 Mojave.

[MikeHalloran]

I have an email in to Sweetwater, asking for clarification on the pricing.

Sweetwater updated the web site. Here's the link with the $119 price:

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... n-download

The other big resellers should have that sorted out soon.

[motet]

Here's another article about version 26:

http://www.rpmseattle.com/of_note/final ... 26-review/