last breath

[dtoub]

Just for fun, I recovered the text from that 1998 paper I wrote for a class on Finale. No good way to preserve the images, but the text is there at least. Unfortunately, this forum doesn't seem to allow attachments like .docx, .txt, .pdf, etc. ????

[BuonTempi]

Try zip?


I imagine a similar thing to Avid/Sibelius happened when MM moved to Boulder -- a lot of the people who know the insides of the product, and how it works have since left. Mark Adler, Mark Johnson, etc, etc.

Here's a review of Finale version 2.

Review by Joseph Rothstein: Computer Music Journal, Winter, 1991, Vol. 15, No. 4

After working with Finale for three months, I believe it is perhaps the most comprehensive music notation program available. It incorporates virtually all standard notation symbols, and I have yet to concieve of any notation need that Finale has been unable to meet.

The bad news is that I found Finale extremely difficult to learn and use. Throughout Finale, a wide variety of command entry modes is required. Some operations require using iconic tools, other involve menus (with associated buttons, dialog boxes and submenus), while still others the PC’s key, alone or in combination. Learning to perform simple operations is often easy, but requires a series of slow cumbersome steps. Performing the same operation quickly often requires learning arcane commands or keystrokes that bear little intuitive relationship to the operation performance.

Throughout Finale, the program’s authors seemed to attach considerable importance to providing shortcuts for experienced users. Once understood and committed to memory, they speed up almost all aspects of using the program, but there are so many commands, and so many shortcuts to learn, and the relationship between musical operation, command, and shortcut is so abstract that learning the basic operations and shortcuts involves a tremendous amount of rote memorizing.

The only problem with the documentation is that every word is necessary.

In fact, Finale is among the least intuitively evident programs I have seen. Even after months of using Finale, I still don’t feel as if I know the program thoroughly, and I often reach an impasse when I use a new feature or one I haven’t worked with in a while.
Perhaps there is a way to provide the depth, flexibility and power of a notation program like Finale, without the incredible learning curve that Finale requires. I’m not a skilled enough software designer to answer; just a frustrated enough user to ask the question.

Meanwhile, Finale is clearly a monumental achievement of programming, and it appear to be the obvious choice for IBM-PC users seeking the most powerful notation tool available and prepared to make the investment required to learn to use it effectively.

Finale 2.0 for IBM-PC by Coda Music Software. $749.

[dtoub]

From 1998; note the last sentence...


FINALE 3.5.2:
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF AN ELEGANT APPLICATION

David Toub

Background

Function
Until the development of music notation software, composers had to laboriously hand-write every score and instrumental part. Besides the extensive time commitment involved, making revisions was difficult, legibility was often a problem, and unless a score was published it could not be easily distributed short of making several photocopies of questionable quality. Every composer, weary of the intensive process of hand-notating music, wished for the ability to have his compositions automatically notated in real time with 100% accuracy.

Finale still does not make the process that elementary, but it comes very close to the above ideal. Finale is a music notation application developed by Coda Software in 1988, and is widely considered to be the leading cross-platform application of its kind. It takes musical ideas entered with a computer keyboard, mouse, synthesizer or sequencer file, and processes a complete score ready for publication along with individual instrumental parts. As such, it has elements that resemble a page layout program as well as a text processor, and Finale is capable of producing musical scores ranging from elementary to avant-garde. Version 3.5.2 was released in 1996 and may represent the pinnacle of music notation software, as three major upgrades have not significantly improved upon the program’s feature set or ease of use.

There are many advantages to be gained by using a music notation application like Finale:

Music entry is facilitated
Scores have publication-quality legibility
Backups are automated, preventing data loss
Instrumental parts are automatically created by the software
Scores may be proofread via audio playback
Editing is facilitated and internal error checking is available
Scores may be posted or transmitted via the Internet
Music may be recorded for playback

Notation Versus Sequencing
Like many high-end notation programs, Finale also has basic sequencing functions. A notation program generally takes musical input and formats it into a display of notated output. In its purest sense, a notation program is intended to obviate the process of manually writing out musical scores, much as a word processing application simplifies document creation. A sequencer, on the other hand, is an application (or hardware device) that can manipulate individual notes or musical patterns for subsequent playback. Software sequencers predated notation software, due to the greater interest in the ability to edit and record digitized sound. Sequencer packages like Opcode’s Vision can playback and edit digitized sound from a musical controller like a synthesizer. The synthesizer is connected to a computer through a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) interface. MIDI is the protocol that is the basis for all musical communication between a computer and a musical controller, since it represents a sound, along with duration, attack, and velocity in digital form. Finale makes extensive use of MIDI, both for note entry and as part of its elementary sequencing functions. To further blur the distinction between notation and sequencing software, all major sequencing applications contain basic notation capabilities, though none are as sophisticated as the most basic dedicated notation program.

Musical notation, unlike pure text, does not easily lend itself to automation. As a symbolic language, notated music needs to represent pitch, dynamics, duration, attack and other qualities. Real-time music entry, which can be accomplished with Finale, represents a major programming achievement. Like OCR, however, accuracy is still not quite perfect. Complex rhythms, nonstandard musical elements, note spacing and cross-staff beamings are not uncommon in modern music and it is a challenge to design a notation software package that anticipates the notational preferences of different composers. There must also be effective methods for data entry, either through a synthesizer, computer keyboard, hardware sequencer, or preferably all three. Most modern notation programs, particularly Finale, have several ways to enter music.

Environment
While Finale was originally written primarily for the MacOS, today it is cross-platform with parity between the Mac and Windows versions, and an NT version is planned. Finale got a major speed boost with v. 3.2.1 due to a recompiling that allowed it to take advantage of the PowerPC processor on recent Macs. Hardware requirements have increased with each major upgrade of Finale. In general, with more RAM and CPU power, the program’s performance improves. While it is quite feasible to utilize Finale without any MIDI keyboard, it is considerably easier to enter notes and obtain reasonable playback if one connects a synthesizer to a personal computer through a MIDI interface. To utilize any notation program with a computer alone means a cumbersome set of keyboard equivalents to allow for music entry. In addition, the quality of sound on even the latest PowerPC-based Macintosh falls far short of the multitimbral, polyphonic digital sound libraries commonplace on midlevel synthesizers.

Conceptually, music may be input either via step-time entry or real-time entry. Step-time entry is analogous to typing in a word processor one letter at a time. Each musical pitch is entered either with a mouse, computer keyboard, or synthesizer keyboard, while the note duration is assigned using a specific key on the computer keyboard. This allows for musical data entry even on a laptop since no MIDI data is required. Real-time entry can be thought of as reciting a book chapter into a computer’s microphone while a word processor types the sentences en masse with decent accuracy. For real-time music entry, MIDI is required, and the notation software can actually transcribe a musical performance on the fly.
History

Beginnings-First Generation Software
In the late 1970’s, a combination synthesizer / printer was the first significant alternative to the time-honored tradition of handwriting musical scores. While many composers and musicians expressed interest, the device was limited in scope and expensive. At the time, there were no software packages for music notation, nor were personal computers commonplace.

Adobe, in 1986, released the Sonata font for music notation on computers. Until this development, there were no bitmapped, TrueType or PostScript fonts for musical symbols. Once a music font was disseminated, notation and sequencing software followed. The first music notation software programs appeared around 1986, including Professional Composer, Deluxe Music Construction Set, eMagic’s Notator, Polywriter, Concertware and Personal Composer. All of these programs had major limitations. They were slow, could not notate anything other than elementary scores requiring few staves, and had crude interfaces. Real-time musical entry did not exist. Part of the dilemma was the limitations of hardware in the mid-80’s. The applications were not cross-platform, running on specific (slow) machines ranging from the Macintosh and Atari to IBM-compatibles. Nonetheless, that a personal computer could aid the process of notation was noteworthy.

Second Generation Software
1988 saw the arrival of several new applications, including Finale, Music Engraver and MusicPrinter Plus. All of these second generation programs sported improved feature sets, such as larger number of staves per page, and had some ability to enter music in real time. Accuracy of real-time entry was variable, however. Some of the programs were cross-platform, although one platform (generally the Mac) would often be upgraded preferentially. Finale in particular addressed the needs of professional composers by touting its ability to handle almost anything thrown at it. From the start, Finale was able to accommodate music entry in a variety of ways, including several forms of step-time and real-time entry. Its page layout capabilities were particularly admirable, as Finale could produce professional-looking scores that competed with the best music copyists. It was very flexible and customizable, to the degree where it could even print individual elements at different sizes on the same page.

Finale represented the high-end of the music notation programs. Along with an excellent feature set, however, came a reputation for complexity that Coda is still working to overcome. In order to produce a professional-looking score, one had to navigate through several levels of palettes. For example, entering a single articulation on a page meant opening (and then closing) multiple windows, which was time-consuming. There was also a steep learning curve, even to carry out elementary music notation functions. On the other hand, Finale 1.0 was unique in its ability to edit and customize virtually any musical element, down to the thickness of note stems or barlines. Finale 1.0 was capable of handling almost any notational challenge so long as the user was willing to tolerate a complex interface. As musician and computer columnist David Pogue put it, “Some people said that Finale 1.0 was like a jetliner: it had enough power to take you anywhere-but there sure were enough controls on the dashboard.” (From Finale 3.0 Installation Manual).

Third Generation Software
Perhaps in response to the perceived difficulty for users of Finale, the early 1990’s saw the development of several new notation programs. MusicProse (a Windows-only program from Coda), Encore, Rhapsody, FreeStyle, Lime, Midiscan, Musicator and Cubase Score were marketed as having nearly as complete a feature set as Finale but with an easier learning curve. Nightingale was particularly seminal as a Macintosh notation program that had OCR capabilities. Being able to enter handwritten music into a computer with a scanner had promise, but the level of accuracy did not result in time savings since the output required considerable editing. This was true as well of Midiscan, which was developed for Windows 3.x and apparently lost support after version 2.5. To capture users who did not want or need the more advanced features of Finale (by then at version 3.0), Coda developed a “lite” application called Finale Allegro.

Despite the availability of many less-complicated competitors, Finale still was the program of choice for professional composers, in large part due to its complete feature set. Beginning with v. 2.0, the interface had been simplified to a great extent, allowing a broad range of users to take advantage of Finale’s power. Finale gained exposure by its role in printing several of George Gershwin’s unpublished compositions from the original piano rolls. The program was also utilized by music industry attorneys to notate examples for use in copyright infringement cases. Finale even survived stiff competition from Opcode, the leading developer of MIDI applications. Opcode’s application, Overture, was heavily promoted as a user-friendly alternative to Finale:

“Overture–easy to use Macintosh notation software that’s powerful enough to satisfy today’s demanding musician. Its intuitive interface uses tear off palettes to keep all of Overture’s professional features a mere keystroke or mouse click away. Overture helps you meet tight deadlines with features like Step Entry, which lets you quickly enter or delete notes, rests, rhythmic slashes and chord symbols. Functions in Overture are active without switching modes, so you spend your time creating music, not searching menus. From complete orchestrations to single measure examples, nothing helps you score faster than Overture.” (From Opcode promotional brochure for Overture)

While Overture received a decent review from Electronic Musician magazine, several major bugs were found in version 2.0 and the program languished. Overture also could not do many things that were available in earlier versions of Finale, such as nested tuplets.

Present Day
Finale continues to be the notation software of choice for the MacOS and Windows platforms. Since the release of version 3.5.2, Finale has undergone 3 major upgrades (v 3.7, Finale 97 and Finale 98). Opcode has reportedly discontinued Overture, although rumors abound on the Internet that another music software company may buy the rights to Overture and support its development. Most of the notation programs mentioned previously have been discontinued with few new applications on the horizon. A notable exception is the 1997 release of the shareware program Opus from the Italian developer Sincrosoft. Opus has many features in common with Finale; whether it continues to have user and developer support remains to be seen.

Coda Software’s Expectations of Finale

From the start, Coda designed Finale as a high-end notation package that was aimed at music professionals. Most contemporary notation products were budget-priced and aimed at consumers with varying music experience. Instead, Coda set out to capture composers and musicians who otherwise relied on their own manual labor or that of high-priced music copyists. Towards this end, Coda focused on making Finale the market leader by emphasizing its enormous power combined with impressive speed and improvements in its user interface. Management, in the form of CEO John Paulson, put it succinctly in the Spring, 1995 edition of the company’s newsletter, Coda Notes:

“Coda has a tradition of developing innovative music technology products that serve as the industry standards against which other products are measured. With your help, we can continue this tradition and create better products that are as useful as they are innovative.”

This is supported by a recent e-mail from John Hanson of Coda:

“... Finale is intended to be the “standard" music notation software in the world for anyone who wants to notate their music. The current Finale products address the needs of the intermediate and high end notation market, which was certainly the intent even back in 1988. Based on the current status of Finale, it's quite clear that we have achieved our goal.”


Results

Positive Attributes
Finale 3.5.2 is a professional notation program with too many features to discuss here. There are several niceties, however, that are well-implemented and worthy of mention. These features distinguish Finale 3.5.2 from its competitors, and justify its reputation as an elegant application that is a pleasure to learn and use.

Ram Disk Loading
Music notation software, from the beginning, requires a fast CPU and a good deal of RAM. In many respects, music software in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s was constrained by hardware. While programs like Finale could technically run on older Macs with 2 MB or less of RAM and a 68030 processor, they did so at speeds that were often too slow to be useful. Coda’s solution, in part, was to enable the program to load temporary files onto a RAM disk by pressing the command and option keys upon launching the program. This gives an enormous speed boost compared with hard disk access. The use of temporary files is a nice touch as well, since it protects the original document from being lost in the event of a system crash.

Redraw Options
Finale provides another approach to improving speed by allowing the user to interrupt screen redraws, select certain elements to be omitted from the redraw, and store pages in a fast cache. Much of the processing time is used to render screen images, so these options can significantly improve the program’s performance.
EMBED Word.Picture.6
Metatools
While Finale does not contain a formal macro language, per sé, it can map certain functions to number keys (“metatools”). Instead of navigating two or more palettes to enter a musical expression, a user-assigned number key can be used to place the expression in the score in one fell swoop. Another advantage of the metatool approach is that any changes made to the assigned expressions do not have global effects. Without metatools, any edits made to an individual score marking will affect all previous markings, which may not be desirable.
Documentation
Mastering Finale can be a challenge for the user. Fortunately, Coda’s documentation ranks with the best software manuals. The manuals are well written and arranged in three parts: Installation/Tutorials, Encyclopedia and Reference. The Encyclopedia is indexed along functional lines and is useful for finding out “how to do things” (e.g., note entry, MIDI, etc.), whereas the Reference gives details about every dialog box. The tutorials are excellent and presented in a modular format, so that the user can avoid lessons that are not of interest.

Hyperscribe
Finale has a unique feature, called Hyperscribe, to facilitate music entry. With Hyperscribe, the music is input from a MIDI keyboard in real time, and the user supplies the beat marks by either tapping a foot pedal or depressing a specified note on the keyboard. Other notation programs usually supply a fixed metronome beat for this purpose; this does not allow for flexibility on the part of the musician. With Hyperscribe, the musician can slow down or speed up without affecting the software’s ability to accurately notate the music.

MIDI Enhancements
Finale is nearly unique in its ability to playback dynamics and articulations. For example, entering a dynamic marking such as ‘ƒƒ’ will make that section very loud during playback.

Shortcuts
In spite of (or perhaps because of) the program’s complexity, Finale provides some well thought out shortcuts to speed up certain tasks. As an example, the user can select an action (such as a clef change) and simultaneously close all previous dialog boxes by pressing “command-return.” Given that some functions require the user to navigate several dialog boxes, this is a very desirable feature.

Control Over Musical Elements
Finale offers unparalleled control over virtually everything within a musical score. Barlines, noteheads, expressions and other markings may be customized either from a dialog box or a graphics editor. The latter gives the user the ability to design any musical expression with tools that are not unlike those found in dedicated drawing programs.

Color
With version 3.5, Finale became capable of displaying selected musical elements in different colors. Apart from the aesthetic benefits, this allows the user to use color coding to distinguish which markings affect the entire score versus a single staff. Different layers within the same staff can be differentiated as well, which can help avoid entering data accidentally into the wrong layer.
Negative Attributes

Multiple Dialog Boxes
Finale is a powerful program, but that power occasionally comes at the expense of ease of use. One example of this is the multiple palettes and dialog boxes one must navigate in some cases to carry out a single command. To create a new staff expression, the user must navigate a total of eight dialog boxes to create a new shape for that expression and enter it into the score. The command-return shortcut does eliminate closing a few of the boxes, but there are four boxes to get through just to reach the graphic shape designer.

Lack of a Macro Language
Given how many steps the user must go through to accomplish a small task, it would be advantageous to be able to automate many complex processes. While Finale does contain the ability to assign certain score markings to number keys ("metatools"), a true macro function is lacking.

File Formats Change with Upgrades
Every major upgrade of Finale results in a new file format that is incompatible with previous formats. This requires Finale users to either reformat their previous files (which can involve some additional page layout work) or keep older versions of Finale on their hard drives. Finale has no capability within its “Save As...” command to save files in an older format. This is also a problem when distributing scores to Finale users who use older software, since the files may not be accessible.

Colliding Elements
While Finale does provide excellent control over page layout and music spacing, there are some areas where it remains weak. Changing a clef midmeasure frequently leads to collisions between the clef and surrounding notes that are not easily remedied. Similarly, writing two layers of notes within the same staff requires constant editing to fix overlapping notes between the different layers:
To some degree, these problems have been addressed in the most recent upgrade (Finale 98). However, users report on the Internet that the solutions do not consistently work.

Finale Since Version 3.5.2

Overview
Finale 3.5.2 contained numerous improvements while preserving small RAM and hard drive requirements. The application itself occupies 4 MB of storage space and requires from 1.5 to 3 MB of memory, which is not significantly different from version 2.0. It is admirable that such a powerful program fits on 3 floppy disks. Since the release of version 3.5.2, Finale has increasingly raised its hardware requirements and many users have not felt that this was proportional to the amount and type of program improvements. The latest version, Finale 98, requires “8 MB RAM (minimum), 16 MB recommended. 10 MB available hard drive space. 10 MB of free working space on hard drive (20 MB additional hard drive required to load on-line documentation).” (From targeted promotional mailing to Finale users).

As with many applications, there is consumer and corporate pressure to continue to increase the feature set, at the expense of hardware requirements. In Finale’s case, version 3.5.2 had a feature set that was more than ample for most professional users. Continued enrichments in the feature set may not, therefore, be of benefit to many users, and in some ways any program improvements will come at the expense of convenience.

Finale 3.7
As the first major upgrade to v. 3.5, Finale 97 provided some improvements with regard to text and lyric entry. The remaining enhancements (such as easier exporting of encapsulated PostScript files) represent “bells and whistles” rather than features that significantly assist composers with notation. There were corresponding file conversion issues and an initial decrease in speed (up to 50% slower for 680x0 chips) that required a maintenance release to remedy. Major bugs were present, in contrast to previous versions that had the reputations of being exceptionally stable. Particularly onerous was the initial omission of the “command-delete” shortcut that prompted enough angry e-mail to Coda tech support that the feature was reinstated with later maintenance releases.
Finale 97
The next upgrade, released near the end of 1997, included for the first time plug-in modules to perform various tasks like automatic tabulature settings. Many composers may not write for instruments from the guitar family, and thus do not such a tool. There were some improvements in convenience; the ability to add a tie to a preceding measure can be of benefit to most users. The program came, for the first time, on a CD-ROM, largely due to the inclusion of online documentation that replaced the outstanding printed manuals from version 3.x.

Finale 98
This major upgrade was released not very long after many people adopted Finale 97. The promotional mailing indicates significant improvements, such as the ability to print in color, avoid collisions between layers and midmeasure clef changes, and additional plug-ins. What the promotional materials did not mention was the inclusion of a copy protection scheme that requires the user to insert the installation CD-ROM at random intervals to be allowed access to the program. This contrasts with Coda’s previous stance that it felt that copy protection is burdensome to the end user and would not be incorporated into Finale. Most copy protection schemes simply prevent the user from copying the software to additional hard drives without the original installation disc. Coda's method of copy protection is intrusive and makes it difficult for users who use laptops without a CD-ROM drive. Finale 98 has proven to be troublesome in other ways as well. Users report on the Internet that key default preference files were altered by the software. This meant that they had to completely reinstall their older versions of Finale if they decided to abandon Finale 98 and use an earlier version. The improved layer and midmeasure clef spacings work inconsistently, a finding that Coda technicians have been able to confirm. Some users have questioned Coda’s beta testing procedures, although the company states that it thoroughly tested the software before public release.


What’s Next?
Coda plans to release a version of Finale for Windows NT 4.x. Given the large installed base on the Macintosh platform, it is unlikely that Coda will discontinue MacOS support, although their focus has become less Macintosh-centric with the rise of Windows users. Presumably, the next version of Finale will incorporate several bug fixes and additional plug-in modules. It is hard to see how the program can be significantly improved as far as feature set, since by version 3.5 Finale had virtually any feature a composer could ask for, and then some.

Conclusions
Finale 3.5.2 is a powerful software package that accomplishes virtually any music notation challenge. While this power comes at the expense of ease of use, Coda has made major strides in simplifying the end user interface. Coda has been responsive to the requests of its installed base, including or modifying features based in large part to user demand. Since version 3.5.2, the program has added few major features, in part because the feature set of 3.5.2 is already very rich. Upgrades to 3.5.2 have been noteworthy for increased hardware requirements, lack of printed documentation and occasional bugs. Nonetheless, Finale remains the notation software of choice for professional musicians, and has outlived many competitors. It could be argued that v. 3.5.2 was the pinnacle of this product, in terms of its compelling new features, small RAM size, and lack of major bugs.

[ebiggs1]

As I stated MM is putting all its eggs in one basket.

In the spring of 2022, MakeMusic acquired Upbeat Music App. Recently, MakeMusic Cloud (formerly SmartMusic) added video recording in assignments as a first step in integrating Upbeat capabilities. Our next step is to sunset Upbeat and continue to work on further integrations in MakeMusic Cloud.

As of June 16, 2023, the Upbeat Music App website and both the free and paid versions of Upbeat Live and Upbeat Perform will be sunset, and user files are no longer downloadable.

MakeMusic will retain users’ files for a period of two months until July 31st. To access any files you have not already downloaded, please contact the MakeMusic Customer Support team via email at upbeat@makemusic.zendesk.com.

[dtoub]

never even heard of "upbeat." What does it do?

[ebiggs1]

What are the annual sales for Makemusic?
Makemusic generates approximately $12.2 million in annual sales.

Who is the CEO of Makemusic?
The CEO of Makemusic is Karen L Vanderbosch.

How big is Makemusic?
Makemusic employs approximately 60 people at this location and 130 total employees at all locations.

What is the phone number for Makemusic?
The phone number for Makemusic is (866) 240-4041

Karen L Vanderbosch is the Chief Executive Officer at Makemusic. You can contact Karen at (866) 240-4041, 285 Century Pl, Louisville, CO.

karen.jpg (16.93 KiB) Viewed 202277 times

What is the internet address for Makemusic?
The website (URL) for Makemusic is www.makemusic.com.

Where is Makemusic located?
Makemusic is located at 285 Century Pl, Louisville, CO 80027. This location is in Boulder County and the Boulder, CO Metropolitan Area.

[ebiggs1]

never even heard of "upbeat." What does it do?

MakeMusic's SmartMusic interactive music learning software, also acquired Weezic.

[miker]

The MakeMusic site certainly makes Finale look like a second thought.

And it’s interesting how much the screenshots resemble MuseScore, rather than Finale.

[smw_brighton]

I discovered Finale in the mid-nineties (Finale 95 - or was it 3.7 then?) and was bowled over by its ease of use - even in those relatively early years. I upgraded with almost every release up to (and including) v2014. It took me a while to purchase v25, as by then I was getting frustrated by the continued lack of fixes to long-term bugs. Although I did [eventually] upgrade to v26, I have never actually installed it as - after reading of several issues in v25 which had not been fixed - I preferred to "stick with the devil" I knew.

I have not upgraded to v27 due to [what I perceive as] a total lack of meaningful updates. I no longer teach, if I want to share music I will do so the same way I have for 40 years, and 'improved' fonts are of no use to me until I can easily input music without having to employ numerous and long-winded workarounds (or purchase plug-ins like Perfect Layout - which I have bought, and is excellent).

Disillusioned with the direction of Finale, I bought Dorico when it reached version 2, and upgraded to v3, v3.5, v4 and now v5. It still has a way to go (it's only been in development for 6+ years) but the forum is actively monitored [and posted on] by Steinberg staff, and bugs are identified, acknowledged, and fixed very quickly.

A few years ago I was an ardent fan of Finale and recommended it as the product for anyone I knew who wanted to do notation. I no longer feel able to do so, and only use it for editing existing files - or when I need to do something really quickly (I'm not as young as I used to be and Dorico is taking me a while to get used to after 25+ years of Finale).

Although [IMO] it is still ahead of the competition, particularly as far as flexibility is concerned, I think Finale's days are seriously numbered unless something radical happens at MakeMusic. Unfortunately I am beginning to think that they don't really care any more, which - if I'm right - is a real shame.

[ebiggs1]

You should upgrade to 27.3. It’s the best Finale ever not with standing long know bugs. There’s been a lot of them fixed however. At $79 bucks you can’t not do it. The 8 reworked plugins are worth it alone.

[motet]

What bugs have they fixed?

[BuonTempi]

A full list of the bug fixes is here:

https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Fin ... Finale.htm

Interface changes are here:

https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Fin ... hanges.htm

and new features (and improvements) are here:

https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Fin ... _s_new.htm

[dtoub]

Yes, I was also wondering what was fixed, and suspect it wasn't something that really affected me. I literally just got a response to a bug report (for a longstanding issue) from MM support, and the support person has the same issue and it's annoying AF. Yet, all I'm told is it's "hard to solve" and who knows when it might be fixed, if at all?

Finale 27.3 is usable. But recompiling some (hardly all or even the majority) of the really nice JW plugins is not exactly my definition of innovation or a bug fix. Fix the MIDI tool already, and the shape designer, and bring back MP3 export (it used to be there years ago) as well as FLAC and other codecs. I just tweaked an old score of mine and could not get articulations to place correctly or expressions, without manually adjusting every one of them. And yes, I tried Perfect Layout (I even have the Gold edition FWIW) and it did nothing. I suspect the issue was the Finale file.

Oh, and try changing the font of all metronome markings without the numbers going crazy. I had to literally change the font then type in the metronome number for every one of the markings in that score, just to adjust the font in the first place.

It really doesn't have to be that way.

[motet]

The list of fixes is underwhelming, to say the least.

[John Ruggero]

I can't use Finale 27 for old files because so many of the articulations and expressions are mispositioned and have to be readjusted, as mentioned by dtoub, and I can't use it for new files because tuplet adjustments don't work in page view and graphics seem to be iffy. And who knows what other problems. And it even had an issue with Times New Roman fonts that had to be fixed. So what good is it, even at $79.

[ebiggs1]

So what good is it, even at $79.

It has worked perfectly for me. I criticize Finale where it deserves it but I also praise it where it deserves it. Finale 27.3 is the best Finale ever. You may find small issues with Finale 27.3 but you will also find small issues perhaps different ones but they are there in every music notation software there is.

[dtoub]

Well YMMV and glad someone loves Finale. But honestly, even the tuplet position bug is not minor IMHO. It drives me nuts every time. And remember, I have Perfect Laukut and for older scores from when I used a lot of markings and PL should be helpful, it hardly solves problems but more often causes problems. And I’m not sure it’s the script’s fault but more the fault of Finale. Frustrating.

[BuonTempi]

Finale 27.3 is the best Finale ever.

Oh, come now. On what possible criteria do you judge that? Apart from the fact that it's simply the summation of all previous versions.

It has a paltry number of bug fixes from the previous version; and as others have said, old documents still aren't handled well since the articulation scheme. The move to SMuFL is necessary, but hardly a gamechanger for productivity, and a frequent chore when updating old documents.

MuseScore 4.1 has just been released today, with over 100 bug fixes and improvements.
https://musescore.org/en/node/351407

Yes, it may not be good enough yet, but if it's making 100 improvements every release (and these are in addition to the headline features), compared to Finale's... what, 8? ... 15? ... then inevitably it will surpass Finale at some point.

Dorico 5.0.20 has also just been released with over 60 bug fixes and improvements.

... and if you really think that they couldn't find 100 things to fix or improve in Finale, then you haven't been paying attention to the comments in this thread!

[dtoub]

I mean, why is this happening with some, but not all, instances of an expression I am trying to move? Bizarre and buggy.

[dtoub]

Finale 27.3 is the best Finale ever.

Oh, come now. On what possible criteria do you judge that? Apart from the fact that it's simply the summation of all previous versions.

It has a paltry number of bug fixes from the previous version; and as others have said, old documents still aren't handled well since the articulation scheme. The move to SMuFL is necessary, but hardly a gamechanger for productivity, and a frequent chore when updating old documents.

MuseScore 4.1 has just been released today, with over 100 bug fixes and improvements.
https://musescore.org/en/node/351407

Yes, it may not be good enough yet, but if it's making 100 improvements every release (and these are in addition to the headline features), compared to Finale's... what, 8? ... 15? ... then inevitably it will surpass Finale at some point.

Dorico 5.0.20 has also just been released with over 60 bug fixes and improvements.

... and if you really think that they couldn't find 100 things to fix or improve in Finale, then you haven't been paying attention to the comments in this thread!

I couldn't have said it better myself. Again, if someone likes Finale and thinks it's awesome, that's all well and good but objectively speaking, that's not supported by the evidence. Finale has a ton of bugs and besides bugs, lots of things that need enhancement, and a complete rethinking of the app might be necessary. As in starting over from a coding and UX perspective.

[motet]

People are doing such a wide variety of music that I think it's not very meaningful to generalize one's experience to others.

In my experience, Finale has never been very good about accurately opening older files. It can of course open the files, but there can be subtle differences in addition to not-so-subtle ones. If you have a large piece, say an opera with thousands of measures and 15 parts, each with dozens of pages, it can be daunting and error-prone to proofread and check everything. Not to mention a huge time-sink.

So instead I keep several versions of Finale around, as shown in my profile here, and use the version the piece was created with. Fortunately, Windows will run old programs--my oldest version is Finale 2005--but I don't know what Mac users do, since it new versions of the Mac OS tend to render older versions of Finale unusable.

I've been meaning to generate MusicXML files of everything in case MakeMusic goes belly-up, but I'm in a quandry: it seems like newer versions of Finale have better MusicXML export, but the newer versions are more likely to introduce problems into my older files. The reports here of Finale 27 are particularly troublesome. So, which version to use (I also own Finale 26, but have never installed it)?

[ebiggs1]

People are doing such a wide variety of music that I think it's not very meaningful to generalize one's experience to others.

Thank you.

I've been meaning to generate MusicXML files of everything in case MakeMusic goes belly-up, ...

Perhaps not the best solution but certainly the safest and most dependable, print everything to hard copy.

[ebiggs1]

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I understand that some people find fault, extreme fault with Finale. What's the reason? Who knows. It may be some bug that they see as a world ending catastrophe or maybe something very minor. Perhaps they just don't know how to use Finale. Whatever, but what I want to know is if you or they feel so strongly, why are you still using Finale. Why are you not using the better Sibelius or very much Dorico, not to mention the new notation leader Musescore 4.1. I know if I felt that way I wouldn't stick with Finale but you must still see it as the best choice. Actions speak louder than words!

Finale 27.3 is the best Finale ever and I stand by that firmly. Finale 27.3 along with NPv3 and Noteperfomer 4 are the best and as good as it gets in music notation in 2023. Otherwise I would not use it.

[dtoub]

I haven’t drunk the kool-aid I guess. Finale 3.5.2 was elegant. For all the reasons I stated in that old paper I wrote. But we are not using F3.5.2 and our needs change.

I stay with Finale because I’m an old alter cocker and have a day job that makes it hard enough for me to find time to compose music, let alone take on learning Dórico. If I were starting out today or had the time and inclination, I’d be using Dorico. Also, I have several decades worth of Finale files and it would be a pain to have to convert to MusicXML and import. So I’m locked in for better or worse. There are a few nice things that finale has that others probably don’t, like metatools, but I suspect most things we like about Finale are already added to Dorico. And they have clearly superior support and responsiveness. It may be cult like but it’s that way in part, I suspect, because they are so responsive to their users.

Once F27 came out with, as best I can tell, no beta testing from those of us who usually are involved in that, and it’s functionality was flawed initially and so underwhelming, I suspected things were starting to circle the drain, as we say in medicine.

[motet]

People are doing such a wide variety of music that I think it's not very meaningful to generalize one's experience to others.

Thank you.

I was actually directing that at you. Concert band music is different from piano music is different from vocal music is different from non-traditional scores. So to say that the latest version of Finale is great for you and to suggest that others perhaps either don't know how to use it correctly or are complaining too loudly about minor things betrays an ignorance of different uses and experiences.

I've installed Finale 27.3 but haven't used it much yet except for helping people with questions here. I've noticed that Simple entry just plain doesn't work sometimes. One can select note durations with the keypad or the mouse but not be able to enter anything--clicking in a measure with the mouse or type ABCDEFG does nothing--I'm forced to quit and restart. One can now write lyrics in Chinese or Arabic with a single font and share music in the cloud, but I don't dare use this fragile version for serious work. This is quite worrisome and doesn't bode well for the future of Finale.