With barely one month to go until MakeMusic will no longer support Finale, we’re in the twilight of the software’s “sunset” — the one-year period during which Finale is no longer available for sale, but users can still obtain official help for the product. That period, as most Scoring Notes readers know by now, began on August 26, 2024, when MakeMusic announced that it would cease development of Finale, no longer sell it, and instead endorse a crossgrade path for its users to migrate to Dorico Pro at a specially discounted price.
It’s always darkest before the dawn, though, and after the initial panic and hand-wringing that some people felt upon hearing the news, the reality of the post-Finale landscape has settled in, along with the realization that the sun will continue to rise.
Still, as the end of the support period fast approaches, at Scoring Notes we want to summarize exactly what will happen before, on, and after August 26, 2025, help Finale users escape the twilight zone of confusing information, and ride off into the sunset with confidence.
This is the first in a series of several articles we’ll be publishing in short succession. Here we’ll focus on what to expect as the support period comes to an end, how to use your Finale license to obtain other software (including other versions of Finale), and how you can continue to download and authorize Finale. Stay tuned in the coming days as we address the facts, strategies, and recommendations for Finale users as they traverse the path into the unsupported era.
News recap
If you’ve just read the above introduction and are gobsmacked, then you may wish to begin by reading our extensive Scoring Notes article published on August 26, 2024, and was updated for several weeks afterwards, where we reported on the news, chronicled the history of Finale and gave a business analysis of the field of, and market for music notation software. We also discussed the news in an episode of our Scoring Notes podcast.
As mentioned, MakeMusic announced that it would cease development of Finale and no longer sell it. They also announced that Finale technical support would end in one year from the day of the announcement, i.e., effective August 26, 2025, you will no longer be able to receive Finale technical support from MakeMusic.
When first making the announcement, MakeMusic said that it will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new device after August 2025. However, one day later on August 27, the company revised that policy in a statement that said that Finale authorization will remain active “for the foreseeable future” (see below, “Authorization and downloads”).
How to leverage an existing Finale license to get other notation software (or the last version of Finale)
Retaining your Finale license
It’s worth mentioning up top that when you take advantage of any of the crossgrade offers mentioned here, you will not lose your existing Finale license. Although verification of your Finale ownership is required to determine eligibility for special pricing, you do not surrender the ability to use Finale so that you may use Dorico or Sibelius. Moreover, taking advantage of one offer (i.e, the crossgrade to Dorico Pro) does not preclude you from also being eligible for another offer (i.e., the crossgrade to Sibelius Ultimate).
Dorico Pro
Coincidental with the news of the end of Finale was the announcement that MakeMusic partnered with Steinberg to endorse a crossgrade path for its users to migrate to Dorico Pro at a specially discounted price, available only at the MakeMusic store. The customer must log into their MakeMusic account and be a registered user of Finale or Finale PrintMusic to complete the purchase.
At the time of the announcement, the price was $149, for Dorico Pro 5 (for comparison, Dorico Pro retails for $580 and the usual crossgrade price from a competing product is $300).
Upon the release of Dorico Pro 6 on April 30 of this year, the offer was made applicable to Dorico Pro 6 under the same terms and conditions. Users who had previously obtained Dorico Pro 5 under this special offer and wish to update to Dorico 6 are eligible for Steinberg’s usual update pricing for Dorico Pro customers at a cost of $99.99, directly from Steinberg. If you first activated your existing Dorico Pro 5 license on or after March 27, 2025, you are entitled to a free grace period update to Dorico Pro 6.
More recently, on July 2 of this year, MakeMusic announced that Finale users who have not already purchased the special crossgrade to Dorico Pro can get an additional 15% off the exclusive $149 price by using the coupon code DORICO15 at checkout. Once again, this special offer is available exclusively and directly from the MakeMusic online store, and requires the customer to log into their MakeMusic account and to be a registered user of Finale or Finale PrintMusic to complete the purchase.
MakeMusic told Scoring Notes that the coupon code offer “will last through the end of August”.
At this time, it is not known how long the Dorico Pro crossgrade will be available from MakeMusic, but MakeMusic told Scoring Notes, “We will provide an update well in advance of the end of the offer.”
Finale v27
It’s worth reinforcing that the aforementioned crossgrade offer is available to any registered user of Finale or Finale PrintMusic — of any version, going back to the beginning of Finale. So even if you purchased, say, Finale 2011, and never upgraded Finale again, you’re still eligible for the Dorico crossgrade.
Whether you were squeezing every bit of mileage out of your old Finale version, procrastinating, or just never had a reason to upgrade, it’s no longer possible to simply upgrade to the latest —and last — version of Finale, which is 27.4.1.
However, you can still obtain that version of Finale if you purchase the aforementioned Dorico Pro crossgrade. Anyone doing so will receive a complimentary upgrade to Finale v27.
This is worthwhile if you intend to use Finale and open Finale files for some time to come, since it is likely that Finale v27 will run on newer operating systems longer than older versions of Finale, even when it’s no longer officially supported. Moreover, Finale v27 includes the latest version of MusicXML, which will make it easier to transfer the data in these files to other music notation software. We’ll have forthcoming articles in the series both on using Finale and converting Finale files to MusicXML.
It is our understanding that, even after August 26, when Finale will no longer be supported, anyone purchasing the Dorico Pro crossgrade from MakeMusic will still be able to obtain a complimentary upgrade to Finale v27.
Sibelius Ultimate
This development has been good for Finale customers wishing to crossgrade to Sibelius Ultimate instead of, or in addition to Dorico Pro.
Avid responded to the news by dropping the price of its competitive crossgrade to $99 for a 1-year subscription to Sibelius Ultimate, a 20% reduction off of the usual competitive crossgrade price of $120, and 50% off of the normal subscription price of $199.
Further, Avid made its perpetual license for Sibelius Ultimate available for $149 — matching the Dorico offer. This is a license that comes with one year of support and updates, and will continue to remain active on your computer even if you do not renew the support plan. This is a $50 reduction from the usual price of $199 for a competitive crossgrade to a perpetual license of Sibelius Ultimate. Sibelius Ultimate customers wishing to renew their support and update plan thereafter pay $99/year.
On a special resource page entitled “Welcome Finale Users“, Avid said, “Here at Sibelius, we are sad to hear of a company in the notation space ceasing development. To this end, we want to offer Finale users a new home with Sibelius as your music notation software; one that’s built for the future, where you can continue making music on any device. We are here for you!”
These offers have continued to remain active since August 2024, and we have not heard anything about if or when they will expire.
Capella
The makers of the Capella music notation application are offering a crossgrade offer for users of other music notation software. The crossgrade price is $119 for the notation application, or $238 with their scanning application included in a bundle. When purchased separately at the regular price, the applications cost $248 and $218 respectively, so this represents a discount of approximately 50%.
Registration via a special order form is required.
MuseScore Studio
MuseScore Studio is free, so there’s no need to present Finale credentials, proof of ownership, or a secret handshake to obtain it at a special price. You just go to their web site, download the software (optionally using the Muse Hub), install it, and begin using it.
Still, MuseScore’s developers are keenly aware that Finale customers are searching for a new home, and have added new features that are designed specifically to appeal to Finale users switching to MuseScore Studio.
What happens on August 26
Support
Monday, August 25, 2025 will be the last day that you can receive any kind of official support for Finale by phone or email. On Tuesday… that’s it; you’re on your own! Good night, and good luck!
We’re (mostly) joking. Yes, official interactive support from MakeMusic is going away, but in practical terms, this was probably a last resort for some users. There will still be plenty of official and unofficial resources available for Finale users to consult.
Resources
MakeMusic has told Scoring Notes that their official resources will remain available after August 25. Users will be able to access the Finale Knowledge Base, the User Manuals (from Finale v27 all the way back to Finale 2009), the Finale Community, and even the old MakeMusic Forum, which was locked and archived at the end 2016. Of course, nothing is guaranteed to last forever, but MakeMusic has a good track record here. Still, though, if you really get stuck and need to talk to someone at the company specifically about Finale, that option will no longer be available.
MakeMusic has also posted a series of FAQs specifically about the Finale sunset and the Dorico Pro crossgrade, many of which we are also answering here and elaborating upon in this and the other articles to follow.
Many of the popular resources that Finale users used like unofficial online forums and Facebook groups — not to mention two of our favorites: Conquering Finale and Scoring Notes — will all be accessible for quite some time. We will provide more details about these resources, and some others, in another article in the coming days.
Authorization and downloads
When you first open Finale on a new computer, you are prompted to enter your serial number. Finale then pings an authorization server at MakeMusic to check to see if you have authorization seats available. Every Finale license comes with two authorization seats, so if a seat is available, the server will ping back to the software on your computer to tell it that it’s OK to use on that computer. Then, that computer is registered to fill one of the seats. If no seats are available, you have to go to the MakeMusic Store website and de-authorize an old computer in order to make a seat available.
This is a reasonably easy way for a customer to legally use their licensed copy of Finale on any computer that they own now or may own in the future, but it does depend on that authorization server at MakeMusic to remain operational. Upon the initial announcement of Finale’s sunset last year, MakeMusic said that the authorization server would also be shut down after one year — effectively freezing out Finale from ever being installed on another computer after that time, even if a customer had a valid license but had already used their two seats.
Thankfully, MakeMusic quickly reversed course, and said, “As a result of our community’s feedback, Finale authorization will remain active for the foreseeable future.” We recently contacted MakeMusic and they have confirmed that this is still the case — “the end of support will not impact the Finale authorization servers.”
We also confirmed that you will still have access to the the MakeMusic store and be able to download your registered products. If you go there and login to your account, in the My Software tab you’ll see your most recent registrations. It’s possible you may have never navigated here before, but there are several helpful links and buttons: Download, Manage Authorizations, and Previous Versions.
Clicking on Download will take you to a popup window where you’ll be prompted to download the software for Windows or Mac. (You can repeat the process if you need to download versions for both operating systems.)
If you click on Manage Authorizations, you will expose the current authorizations for your Finale license. This is where you can delete an authorization to free up a seat, as described earlier.
Further, if you click on Previous Versions, you’ll be able to download any previous version you may have purchased, back to Finale 2012, and you’ll be able to manage authorizations dating back, incredibly, to Finale 95.
Incidentally, clicking all the Manage Authorization buttons will give you a nice stroll down old-computer-memory-lane!
The Download Library
There’s another area on the store that is worth noting: the Download Library.
This is a vast repository of items such as the latest maintenance update for every version of Finale dating back to Finale 97, font pack installers, old documentation, holiday music(!) and the Dolet MusicXML plug-ins for Finale and Sibelius. If you download Finale from the previously-mentioned My Software area, you’ll automatically get the latest update for the version you choose, so the maintenance updates in the Download Library are useless unless you’ve installed the underlying product; i.e., you can’t use the Finale 2012c updater unless you already have Finale 2012 installed.
If you’re trying to run a really old version of Finale and only have the physical media on which it came, or if you’re an obsessive digital archivist, you may find the Download Library useful; there is one item in particular, though, that you’ll likely want to have: the most recent Finale fonts.
Fonts
Buried deep in the Download Library is one that you’ll want to heed: MakeMusic’s Finale fonts. One installer each for Mac and Windows will install the newer SMuFL-based fonts and the legacy non-SMuFL fonts as well.
Although you will find it in the Download Library, MakeMusic has made it easier to find on this special page. We covered this in-depth in a Scoring Notes post from earlier this year, and we’ll recap it a little more in our next article in this series.
Our next article: Using Finale in the unsupported era
So, the question remains, once support for Finale officially ends in about a month: To Finale or Not to Finale?
We should emphasize that there’s no self-destruct button embedded in Finale’s code that will go off at 12:01 am on Tuesday, August 26!
At worst, we might consider that date the threshold for defining Finale as a “legacy” piece of software. “Legacy” is still a far cry from “non-functional”; nevertheless, it does implore Finale users to make some important decisions about their future notation needs.
There are options. Do you stick it out with Finale as long as possible in the “unsupported era” using every strategy available to make Finale still viable? Or, do you leave Finale behind and transition to another software as soon as possible while archiving and converting all of your past projects as quickly as you can?
For many users, it’s likely some combination of both of these options. Stay tuned for upcoming articles that will explore the strategies for taking either (or both) of these approaches.
ENRIQUE SANCHEZ
OMG……. what a tremendously GENEROUS FAVOR you have given thousands of us! My PRINCIPAL concern and worry, was the AUTHORIZATION process. I would PAY for this if it ever came up. It is MUCH too valuable when a PC or MAC “breaks down” or any other act!
Thanking you, is just NOT enough!
Enrique Sanchez
Finale 3.0/ 1994
Philip Rothman
Glad you found it useful, Enrique! Stay tuned for a couple more articles coming soon.
David Toub
No handwringing here. After the anger and denial phases ended for me in early September of last year, I bit the bullet, moved to Dorico, and am very glad I did. Finale had longstanding bugs/issues for a few years that were never going to go away, and anytime I’ve had to go back to some scores of mine in Finale (I used Finale for over 30 years prior to converting to Dorico) to make a few tweaks or (in the case of my last album on Bandcamp) recreate some audio files, the unpredictability of Finale continued to rear its ugly head.
Not having to deal with dozens of plugins and .lua scripts just to do some routine things in Finale is something I’ve come to appreciate in Dorico. I composed a new work over the past week and hardly had any tweaking to do to make sure the score looked correct. In Finale, that certainly wasn’t usually the case. I loved Finale for a few decades, and even wrote a business school paper in the early 2000’s discussing Finale 3.5 as an “elegant” application, which it very much was for that time. But the cheese has moved, and for me, I decided to move to where the cheese now is. FWIW, Finale still runs, and likely will do so with some possible issues for quite some time on my Mac. But authorization server or not, Finale was very much stuck in the past (just consider its antiquated MIDI tool or Shape Designer to get a back-to-the-nineties vibe). For me, I could not continue to remain on it, even though it was very familiar and I have dozens of Finale files dating back decades).
My point is this: if someone like me, who has a lot of legacy Finale files and until recently didn’t have much free time to learn another complex notation program, could manage to learn Dorico in a month and compose seven scores to date since leaving Finale last September, most people could certainly migrate to another notation program (of which there are at least three major players) and do ok.
I’ve not converted my Finale files to mXML since I’ve not found them to import into Dorico without needing a lot of major tweaks, so I’ve made sure I am happy with the PDFs of my scores that are on my Web site, and am getting a few last earlier works up on Bandcamp and the streaming services so they will all be as good as I’m likely to realize with Finale. Even if not in the short term, at some point, Finale will no longer effectively work. Either the auth server will finally be taken offline (remember, servers are expenses) or a new OS will significantly deprecate functionality within Finale. Support for Intel-based software on macOS via Rosetta will disappear around 2027; while Finale does not require Rosetta to launch, some of my older plugins and even a really nice Farfisa .sfz file I have are all Intel-only, so those will all no longer function. So at some point, it will be switch or be out of luck. That’s just the hard truth.
Mike Halloran
Before August 26, I will post a way to build an external SSD that will boot any Mac made between 2012 and 3rd. Q 2025 and run Finale over Mojave–Sequoia. It is not intuitive but I did it last year. I’m waiting to see if a newer beta of Tahoe fixes many of the problems in the current beta before I post it.
John Bliss
Does the 2-authorization limit apply only to the latest version(s)?
Is it possible to additionally (re)authorize older versions (for use on older machines)?
Mike Halloran
The license server is dumb. It only authorizes the first time you install Finale. If you go in and clear your authorizations, your Macs and PCs stay authorized.
Each version since 2012 has its own pair of authorizations. So, the answer to your question is Yes. I have 2014, 25, 26 and 27 running on my 2012 MacBook Pros. Finale 27 is also running on a few other test machines.
In addition, I have built an external SSD that will boot any Mac made between 2012–2025 and run 27. Once I authorized it, the Macs I boot with it do not require further attention.