Finale Forum

Seemingly when it's always least convenient, Finale decides it forgets my computer and requires authorization. In the past this has been merely alarming, but I've been able to authorize. When I use up too many, I'm able to delete them via the website.

Today however this happened again (Finale 25), but the website seems to be broken. I'm unable to delete my authorization. There is a dialog asking for the reason for deleting the authorization. Clicking on "OK" does a sort of page refresh, and just leaves this dialog on the screen.

So I am unable to delete authorizations, thus I'm unable to activate, thus I am UNABLE TO USE FINALE UNTIL THIS IS FIXED.

I understand software bugs but this is especially infuriating because it's anti-piracy measures causing this. Commercial music notation software should have no reasonable reason to lock me out of using it.

Note: I used Chrome and Firefox, disabling all extensions just in case they interfered.

That stinks. Hopefully there's someone at MakeMusic who cares and fixes it soon. You might try complaining on the official MM support forum, though I'm not sure if they monitor that or not.

When the dust clears, it might be worth figuring out why your authorization keeps breaking. That shouldn't happen unless you move the Finale installation on your disk drive (or to a new drive, etc.). I've never seen it happen without good reason. Of course I'm still using 2014.5, so it's possible the newer versions have some bug; I worry that the technical expertise there seems to be dwindling.

For fun I went my Authorizations page and it's mysterious. My current computer, about a year old, is shown for Finale 2005 and 2011, which I still have installed, but not 2014.5, the one I use every day. That one only shows an authorization from the year 2015 for a computer that's long gone. Needless to say, I didn't try to change anything.

This has happened off-and-on for many years (at least 10 years); I think it's related to removing external hard drives or other hardware changes. I haven't pinpointed it, but (and I know this is idealistic but cmon Finale) I really shouldn't have to change the way I use my computer to satisfy the Finale Authorization Gods.

So far no response from Finale.

Have you cleaned out your browser caches? I've had multiple problems with Chrome over that past several months (Firefox is also chromium based). I've switched over to Opera and haven't had any problems. If cleaning the caches out doesn't work, download Opera and try to de-authorize/authorize your products.

Fortunately Finale support reached out to me ahead of expectation and resolved this for me, manually deleting the existing "phantom" authorizations. They also informed me that you are only able to delete authorizations a limited number of times on the website. Too bad the website has a bug: it is not expected that hitting a delete limit would silently fail rather than showing a descriptive error message.

In any case I can run Finale but live in constant fear of it losing its authorization randomly again =)


> Firefox is also chromium based

@johnmouse Firefox is definitely not chromium-based (source: Firefox developer here ) Though it does share some small bits of code.

tenfour wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 01, 2020 7:50 am

This has happened off-and-on for many years (at least 10 years); I think it's related to removing external hard drives or other hardware changes. I haven't pinpointed it, but (and I know this is idealistic but cmon Finale) I really shouldn't have to change the way I use my computer to satisfy the Finale Authorization Gods.

I think the authorization works by recording which track/sector/etc. finale.exe or one of its DLLs is on, in a secret way. If you are copying hard drive to hard drive, etc., those numbers would change and that would explain it. But it's only a guess.

tenfour wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 01, 2020 7:30 pm

@johnmouse Firefox is definitely not chromium-based (source: Firefox developer here ) Though it does share some small bits of code.

I used to use Firefox exclusively, but it became sluggish with each new update. Even without any add-ons installed or running. Two computers and two entirely different locations. Love Thunderbird though!

Too bad the website has a bug: it is not expected that hitting a delete limit would silently fail...

I doubt it is a bug but rather a set limit by MM.

ebiggs1 wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 03, 2020 2:25 pm

I doubt it is a bug but rather a set limit by MM.

Oh I just meant that as a user, if you click a button and it does nothing at all, this is a bug because it's not expected behavior. I would expect for example a message like "You've exceeded the maximum blah blah". But the behavior now just appears broken and induces a call to tech support =)