last breath

[ebiggs1]

Not trying to be the perennial pessimist but does anyone get the feeling or notion that MM is getting ready to quit or give up on Finale. The first price reduction cut it in half and now they have a Summer Special of $99 bucks and $79 for upgrades. The next price reduction is free, and we have Musescore 5!

I have long thought that the reason MM doesn’t do the bug fixes or fix the quirky stuff, things that the more modern notation products do, is they can’t. Dunno why perhaps it is because the core engine of the Finale isn’t adaptable to it. Unpossible.

[miker]

Ernie,

I can't say that I disagree. I suspect that the old code has been patched and repatched to within an inch of its life, and they won’t (or can’t) take it any further.

Those of us who who have passed our threescore years and ten probably represent the last major group of users. A couple of weeks ago, I taught a handful of classes in Finale at the BHS/SAI Harmony College NW, and there were fewer signups than I’ve seen in the last ten years. Many of the people there are moving to MuseScore, mostly because of the price. So far, the Society is only accepting scores for publication in Finale or Sibelius (and we re-enter them into Finale.) But who knows what the future holds? I guess I’d better get used to MuseScore. I hope that it can do what the BBS community needs…

[motet]

It is worrisome. On the other hand, not fixing bugs is hardly a new development. The best thing would be for someone who wants to work on it to buy Finale or MakeMusic from the present owners.

That said, I think I'll get going on something I've been meaning to do: making MusicXML versions of everything, in case Finale stops working.

[motet]

I did run across a case where Finale is superior to Dorico.

Dorico:

Finale:

358045648_1991517204531296_6639942947039770466_n.jpg (9.46 KiB) Viewed 223504 times

[mknoll]

A few years ago I did a survey of publisher styles regarding dotted opposite-stemmed seconds and found no consensus. Of the four solutions that I found (your Dorico and Finale examples, a third where the upper dot is nearly directly above the lower notehead, and a fourth where the noteheads were reversed, i.e., the stems were not aligned) the Dorico example was, as I recall, the most common (albeit with the noteheads being somewhat closer together). I have looked and I haven't been able to find that Elaine Gould, or any other "expert" weighs in on the question.

[dtoub]

Not trying to be the perennial pessimist but does anyone get the feeling or notion that MM is getting ready to quit or give up on Finale. The first price reduction cut it in half and now they have a Summer Special of $99 bucks and $79 for upgrades. The next price reduction is free, and we have Musescore 5!

I have long thought that the reason MM doesn’t do the bug fixes or fix the quirky stuff, things that the more modern notation products do, is they can’t. Dunno why perhaps it is because the core engine of the Finale isn’t adaptable to it. Unpossible.

I share your concern to some extent. I’ve heard nothing about any new development work and usually that happens over the summer. I seriously doubt anyone there believes Finale is so perfect as to not need any updates. If so, someone is smoking something very hallucinogenic.

On the other hand, I remember many years ago when Sibelius users were concerned that application was circling the drain, and in many ways it really was. But it did come back from the brink to a large extent with a new corporate overlord. The same thing might happen with Finale, although my business sense tells me there is no clear reason for an acquisition.

I have little concern about MuseScore. Free will always trump most things that have a monetary cost associated with them but not always. MuseScore makes sense for dabblers and students. For composers who have more unusual needs, a commercial program is going to win more often than not. The problem for MM is that these days, that commercial program that is compelling is Dorico. The cult is strong for a reason.

[BuonTempi]

It makes sense for MM to encourage as many users as possible onto the latest version and, who knows, perhaps to interest new customers. Despite all the fire sales, users are still coming to this forum and the Success Desk saying "I'm on 2012". Part of that is the lack of meaningful reasons to update beyond keeping up with the latest technology about to be deprecated.

Insanity is, of course, doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. I wrote my first letter to an MM CEO in 2010, urging them to improve their development strategy, fix the bugs, implement the fabled user-request feature list, etc, etc.

There have been regular predictions of MM's demise for at least as many years, and I dare say they must be right at some point between now and the death of the sun. I'm sure that the Sports Training company which owns Finale will divest it, if it becomes a liability.

But, let's face it: based on past performance, you should not expect Finale to develop, improve, or even mend significantly. Compare the list of new features and bug fixes in any Finale release with those found in any other product (and factor-in the frequency of releases): and Finale is orders of magnitude smaller.

Or when was the last time that a feature request on the Zendesk forum was met with "Yes, we'll implement that, and it will be included in our next release, which is in a month."...?

A pessimistic outlook lets you be pleasantly surprised, of course: and when F27.4 introduces Collision Avoidance; Vertical Justification; non-contiguous selections; a brand new MIDI Editor; overhaul of Repeats; 'real' tuplets and beams over barlines as standard; Patterson beams etc as built-in, real-time features; streamlined interface; independent page offsets in Parts and Score; VST3 support -- (to name a few off the top of my head) -- then we'll all be super excited and joyful and happily posting about our love for Finale. And speaking of which:

Dorico. The cult is strong for a reason.

David, you spend more time on the internet talking about Dorico than many people who actually use it!

[dtoub]

David, you spend more time on the internet talking about Dorico than many people who actually use it!

Probably because it’s fascinating to observe this as a long-time Finale user. And also perhaps a little FOMO.

[BuonTempi]

Ha!

More telling, I think, is the fact that the Garritan libraries are once again excluded from the sale.

[dtoub]

As a Dorico user, you also spend time talking about Finale

Seriously though, since the Finale folks over the years have touted you as one of their prominent users, have you contacted them recently, even just to take their temperature? We can sit here and theorize about the future of Finale all we like but it would be good to get an actual data point.

[BuonTempi]

Indeed. I really only use it for a handful of legacy projects that need regular updating.

Finale is like a deranged ex-wife -- I've largely moved on, but I still look back fondly on our years together, and I hope she gets the support she needs to prosper.

My recent attempts to communicate with MM have been met with either silence or boilerplate "We remain committed to the future of the product"-type platitudes.

I did run across a case where Finale is superior to Dorico.

There are plenty of options to improve the default appearance, but I thought it was a golden rule that a note was never separated from its dot. (Mind you, all engraving rules have their exceptions..)

[ebiggs1]

I suspect that the old code has been patched and repatched to within an inch of its life, and they won’t (or can’t) take it any further.

On this we agree and why there has not been significant upgrades. Always one of or both of two reason. Not enough money or they don't know how to. Simple as that.

[dtoub]

As I was just driving back from southern Delaware, it occurred to me that a number of years ago there was a major release of Finale that had no significant enhancements but did address the back end "spaghetti code" to made it flexible and useful for the long-term. Not sure what happened since then, but that was the official line. So in theory, it should not be a matter so much of the code being antiquated. That then begs the question: why haven't things been fixed to a greater extent? I recently spruced up a really old score of mine from the early 80's that I had first entered into Finale over a decade ago, and had to go into the Shape Designer to deal with a simple line for tone clusters. That was painful. It shouldn't be this way-it was like back to the future where the future was 1987.

So surely there are many things that could be brought into the 2020's in Finale and hopefully would not need a ridiculous amount of recoding and recompiling. My concern is that I've not heard of any forthcoming betas and that's odd for this time of year.

[ebiggs1]

You know I would be more salified if MM just fixed some more simple things like the export or save as tools. These do not affect the core software and are probably separate modules. Even Muscscore 4 has at least 10 different ways to save a file.

And the mixer in Finale, even the studio view are a joke in Finale. At least in Musescore 4 you can see all your instruments at a time. If nothing else make the mixer window variable like most other windows so you can stretch it to your ensemble.

[dtoub]

I suspect many of us have our own laundry lists of things we'd love to see as improvements and feature requests. It's getting a bit tiring that there just isn't much communication from MM (in contrast to that other software program, where there is lots of open communication from the developer). Why would/should anyone take up Finale at this point? For those who can afford a commercial program, wouldn't most folks go with Dorico? I get why Sibelius would be not as much of a draw, but even Sibelius seems to get some new stuff whereas Finale updates get us: file sharing (yay!!!), SMuFL (nice but not critical IMHO) and recompiled plugins (good since many of us need them to work in the longer term, but not something that was "new").

[ebiggs1]

Why would/should anyone take up Finale at this point?

That is a major point MM should be asking themselves. Not being a multi-decade Finale user I would not start out with it today,
However, there are a few things in Finale that are minor upgrades like being able to save an mp3.

MM seems to have put all their eggs in the SMUFL and Smart Music cloud basket. Neither that I can tell made or makes a huge difference.

[motet]

There are terrible bugs that undoubtedly are causing customers to quit in disgust and go elsewhere. If the bottom line is to attract or retain customers, they could start there. Off the top of my head, based on personal experience and helping others:

1) Temporary files placed in the system temp directory but are not locked. If Finale is open long enough, the OS will delete them as part of its housekeeping chores, resulting is disaster: the file cannot be saved and all work is lost. This should be very easy to fix, yet has existed for many years.

2) Multimeasure rests: update automatically, the default, is of course desirable--why would you not want the part to reflect what's in the score?--but is implemented such that it affects all multimeasure rests in every part, rather than just the measures that have changed, triggering respacing and discarding any manual updates. Those users that don't quit in disgust may learn to turn it off, but then there's the problem of the score and parts being out of sync.

3) Out of the box, Finale can take minutes to launch in some situations. Users downloading a demo will quickly reject it for that reason.

4) Automatic Update Layout: turning this off leads to much confusion and in fact confers no benefit, since Finale triggers "update layout" anyway sometimes, regardless of benefit. Users who make manual edits too early that get undone by automatic music spacing wrongly decide or are told that automatic update layout is the culprit.

5) "Respect instrument ranges when copying." This is poorly implemented, yet is on by default, confusing unsuspecting users, and in fact is not particularly useful, since it's easy to do an octave transposition after copying with the Selection tool and the 8 and 9 keys. Perhaps it would be useful in certain situations (copying cello to bass, say), but it should be off by default.

6) Multiple measure regions with unchecked "include in measure numbering" in some measures, causes some tools to make changes to the wrong measures, resulting it terrible confusion.

All of these I'm sure have resulted in lost customers.

[BuonTempi]

Computers are doing incredible things for us in all kinds of fields, and music/notation should be no exception. Sibelius is "using AI" to offer chord suggestions.

https://www.scoringnotes.com/reviews/sibelius-2023-6/

Whether you like the concept or not, it's indicative of what software is capable of now. Compare that to manually moving lyric lines away from low-hanging notes and slurs, and a menu item labelled "Redraw Screen"...

[dtoub]

it certainly doesn’t require AI to correctly place score elements the first time without user tweaks

Finale needs to innovate again. At the very least it needs to clean up and improve old tools like the MIDI Tool and Shape Designer that have a UX from the 90’s. And why three Print Setups in different places with different implications? Very confusing and unnecessary.

[RimasG]

This is not the first discussion about the Finale's potential death. There have been before, but I think that today's situation does not inspire optimism among Finale users. That includes me as well. There is also a popular view about brands: if it is not BMW, it is not a car, if it is not Apple, it is not a phone, it is not a computer, and so on. Likewise: what is not Sibelius is not a sheet music software.
I sat down at a computer in 2002. The first music software I came across was Finale v2002. Not the official one, but a hacked one, unfortunately. Finale, even without any computer experience, I found very intuitive and user-friendly. After a month I gave the publishers my set of arrangements. Interestingly, I did not make any fundamental errors in my methodological skills while I was studying, which I later encountered en masse when editing and consulting other authors. About a year later, I was encouraged to try Sibelius 2. With it, I transcribed and edited one piano score. Sibelius did not seem friendly to me. Moreover, many of the editing actions were only possible with the mouse. I did not like it. At that time Finale was definitely better. I soon bought a licensed Finale. However, most of my colleagues quickly switched to Sibelius because they were annoyed by the bugs programmed into Finale. Since I liked Finale, I accepted the errors and learned to cheat the program when necessary. I still work like that today, even though those strange and illogical errors have remained uncorrected for more than 20 years. I had high hopes for the new Dorico. I bought it, but after the Finale I found Dorico confusing. I don't have time to learn and rebuild my skills, as I usually have to do about +/- 100 titles per season, ranging from symphony orchestras, big bands to chamber ensembles of various configurations. And then there's orchestral work and teaching... I felt that something was wrong with MakeMusic when the official forum was closed. This coincides with the slowdown in Finale's development. When the core Sibelius team left for Steinberg, not agreeing with AVID's policy, the newly arrived Dorico stimulated Sibelius to improve, even though many people thought that under AVID Sibelius would be simply killed. In a short time, Dorico improved incredibly. Whereas in Finale, in the larger scores, Tutti can't payback correctly - some sounds in the upright are missing, as they were many years ago, and still are today. In the Finale, the MIDI engine is pathetic. There are a mass of more "weird things" for which I keep waiting for corrections in new versions and upgrades. For many years now to no avail. But I love Finale anyway !

[BuonTempi]

When the core Sibelius team left for Steinberg, not agreeing with AVID's policy, the newly arrived Dorico stimulated Sibelius to improve

The Sibelius team were sacked by Avid -- they didn't leave because of disagreement. That 'cost-cutting exercise" has back-fired massively for Avid.

I found very intuitive and user-friendly.

You're a better man than I. I similarly used a copy of Finale (well, MuseProse 2.1) in the mid 90s -- on a school computer, where the manual was lost. I just pressed things at random until I found out what they did.

[dtoub]

As an aside, in the late 1990’s when I was getting a MBA degree while working, I actually wrote a paper for an assignment where I showed that Finale 3.5 was an “elegant” piece of software. And back then, it truly was. I also have figured out how to make Finale do what I need it to do, but I would not describe it today as elegant. That’s sad.

[RimasG]

I have heard a story that AVID, for reasons of austerity, had the idea of moving the main Sibelius development team to Kiev, or hiring a new, cheaper team there, or something like that. The old Sibelius people disagreed, and there was a serious conflict. Then the idea of creating a new programme on Steinberg's base in Germany came up. Anyway, Cubase already had a pretty good graphical editor. I know quite a few people who used it to write music. But I don't understand why Sibelius had to be sold to AVID. They were really competitive.

[ebiggs1]

But I love Finale anyway !

Me too.

[ebiggs1]

it certainly doesn’t require AI to correctly place score elements the first time ...

It has that and it is done exactly when and where it should be done at the very end of composing. It works very well and is improving all the time.