Leaving Finale behind

In our previous article, “Using Finale in the unsupported era“, we went into great detail about the various methods and strategies you can employ to keep Finale running even after it’s passed its expiration date. Hardware, software, operating systems, plug-ins, fonts, manuals, you name it — we’ve got it.

Now, in the thrilling conclusion to our exciting miniseries, we will tell you why it’s probably not worth it.

Sure, it is possible to keep Finale going on a dedicated computer or partitioned drive for quite some time. And there’s little doubt that, for a portion of the Finale community, this is a sensible or even necessary course to take. Naturally, if we didn’t think that there was a need, we wouldn’t have taken the trouble to outline all of those steps in the first place!

But for the everyday user who is more concerned with making music than, uh, conquering a particular software application, the better course is to set Finale aside and embrace one or more alternatives.

Hopefully by now we’ve clearly established that Finale will no longer be updated — no new technology, no new features, no support, no guarantee you’ll even be able to open the software on a future computer or operating system. Even if some of the plug-ins and scripts see updates, at best, they will be workarounds, more so than they are already.

The feature gap between Finale and the leading alternatives will continue to grow, the compatibility challenges will start to compound, and eventually Finale will become functionally unusable, or at least prohibitively inconvenient.

The point at which Finale becomes effectively unusable will likely be different for everyone. For some it could have happened already; for others it could be five years from now. But, as sad as it makes us to say this… it will eventually happen for everyone.

Our advice is to start investing your time into an alternative. Dorico Pro, Sibelius Ultimate, and MuseScore Studio are all complex programs that can take a while to master. The worst thing you could do is use Finale until the last possible moment and then just get another application the next day and expect to pick up where you left off. Get started on something today. If the project has a leisurely deadline, use that time to learn the new application, and use Finale for the really quick projects for now. Eventually, you’ll be able to use the new application faster and faster until you’ve matched, and even exceeded the efficiency you had with Finale.

Now, we’re not exactly suggesting that you light a match to your decades of Finale files and walk away. The prudent thing to do is to take advantage of this period of time when Finale is still usable — and there are still more Finale users today than there will be at any time in the future — to ease the transition to whatever your next software of choice is.

After all, leaving Finale behind in favor of Sibelius, Dorico or MuseScore for new projects is one thing, but there’s still the matter of what to do with the hundreds, if not thousands of Finale files that you have on your computer. In case it’s not obvious, those other programs will not open .mus or .musx files directly, and likely never will in the future.

So in this article, we’ll explore how to archive your work. The first step is to understand what files you have in relation to Finale. We’ll talk about updating the Finale files themselves; exporting to MusicXML to convert Finale files to another notation program; exporting your Finale files to PDF; and other formats you may wish to consider. Finally, we’ll offer up some thoughts about those alternatives to Finale and the factors you may wish to consider as you choose among them.

File types, what they do, and what can open them

The first step is to see what files you have on your computer, and if they’re Finale files.

Finale files

Your modern standard Finale file will have a suffix, formally known as the “extension” .musx. This file type was introduced with Finale 2014. Among one of the best enhancements in this file format was that it was “future-proof” — sadly, not against the demise of Finale, which wasn’t contemplated at the time — but this means that a .musx file created in a later version of Finale (like Finale v27) can be opened with any version as far back as Finale 2014. In practice, this was rarely advised, since features would degrade as the file would be shared between different versions, but at least you weren’t effectively locked out of the file if you didn’t have the latest Finale version.

If you have a .musx file, opening it in Finale v. 27.4.1 will be your best bet. This will allow you to export it in the latest MusicXML format and also take advantage of better PDF export, both of which we’ll discuss later. Should you need to make MIDI files or audio files from the Finale file, you can do that as well with likely best results in Finale v. 27.4.1.

Finale v. 27.4.1 can also open, as well as export to .mus, the file format used in Finale from its earliest days all the way through Finale 2012. This file format was updated with every Finale release, so, for example, you can’t open a Finale 2012 .mus file in Finale 2011, etc.

Although there is no immediate way to tell which version of Finale a .mus file was saved in, if you open it up in a text editor, the first several lines of the file will be readable enough to clue you in. This one is from Finale 2006, meaning that it can be opened in Finale 2006 or later:

If you absolutely must open the file in the same software in which it was created — with the giant caveat that you’d need to actually find a way to run that older version of Finale — this information will be helpful.

Again, though, these files will open just fine in Finale v. 27.4.1. We recommend doing this, and saving a copy as .musx for any older files that you wish to keep, for more modern archival and to prepare them for future export.

One knock against Finale had been that it seemed like it had too much old code kicking around (we’re looking at you, Shape Designer). But in this case, the ability to essentially open any native Finale file that dates back more than 30 years is very helpful.

Keep in mind, older Macs from the Classic era didn’t always save the file extension, so if you have files that date from this era, or others that are missing an extension, try opening it in your Mac’s Finder > File > Get Info. (Command-I). You’ll likely encounter one of three scenarios, shown here from left to right:

1. The file actually has an extension, but it’s hidden; simply uncheck Hide extension if you wish to show the .mus extension when you browse for it in the Finder.
2. The file is missing an extension, but there’s other metadata in the file that enables the Mac to identify it as a Finale file; you can click in the Name & Extension box and manually type .mus to the end of the file name. The Mac will give you a warning; click Add to proceed:
3. The file is missing an extension and the Mac cannot identify it. In this scenario, if you’re certain it’s a Finale file, do the same as above and manually type .mus to the end of the file name; if you want to be extra-sure, try opening it in a text editor first and see if you can definitely identify it as a Finale file from the first few lines before you add the extension. This one dates from Finale 98:

In all cases, only add the .mus extension. Do not add .musx if it’s not actually a .musx file — if you want to convert it to the later format, open the file in Finale v. 27.4.1 and then save a copy in the later format.

“Finale-adjacent” files

But wait, there’s more!

It’s quite possible you’ll have other files on your computer that we’ll call “Finale-adjacent”; some of these are only designed to work with Finale, while others can be opened in other software. Depending on your computer’s settings, the latter variety (i.e. MIDI or MusicXML) might display with a Finale-like file icon even if it was created in other software.

Here are a few of the more common Finale-specific ones:

Finale Template file (.musx or .ftmx, on Windows): This is a file that can be used as a template for creating Finale documents.

Backup file (bak.musx or bak.mus): This is a backup of a standard notation document file.

Finale AutoSave file (.asvx or .asv) : This is an automatically saved backup of a standard notation document file.

Finale Library file (.lib): A Finale library may contain a set of symbols (such as Chords or Articulations), markings (such as Text Expressions), or settings (such as Document Settings or Spacing Widths. (Note: Sibelius House Style libraries also use the .lib extension.)

Finale Font Annotation file (.fan): This is a file used by Finale to display the correct spacing of individual characters in music fonts.

ENIGMA Transportable Format (.etf): This is an early version of Finale notation files in plain text format. They were used to transfer Finale documents between Windows and Mac. The ability to create ETF files was discontinued in 2007, but you can still open them in the latest versions of Finale, upon which they’ll be converted to .musx.

In the Finale Manual, there is a very helpful section with two tables that display all these, and more, like SmartMusic files. Consult this page for more information about what these files are, what they do, how to make them, and how you can open them.

Other files

As mentioned, you may have other files that can be associated with Finale, but may or may not have been created with it.

These will likely be one of the following:

MIDI Sequence file (.midi, .mid): This is a standard MIDI sequencer file. It can be read by most sequencer programs. If you want to export a MIDI file from Finale, choose File > Export > MIDI File. Name the file and click Save.

MusicXML file (.musicxml or .xml) or Compressed MusicXML file (.mxl): This is a notation document in XML format (compressed if .mxl), used for sharing your document with other music software. If you want to export a MusicXML file from Finale, choose File > Export > MusicXML or File > Export > Translate Folder to MusicXML. Name the file and click Save. (Note: it’s possible that some MusicXML files may have been saved with the extension .xml, but that doesn’t mean that all XML files are MusicXML files.)

Since many people will be interested in exporting MusicXML files for use in other software, let’s explore that scenario further.

Archiving Finale files as MusicXML files

Setting expectations

MusicXML is a specific type of XML file format first invented by Michael Good in 2004 and initially developed by his company, Recordare LLC. In 2011, MakeMusic acquired Recordare and took over development of MusicXML until 2015 when it was transferred to the W3C Music Notation Community Group where it has been maintained and developed ever since. The latest version of MusicXML, 4.0, was released in 2021, just two weeks before the release of Finale v27, which turned out to be the last major release of Finale.

A MusicXML file is essentially a text document. If you open an uncompressed MusicXML file in a text editor, you can see the actual text code which looks something like this:

Yes, it can take this many lines of code to just represent a single note!

MusicXML is meant to be a universal translator. All of the major notation applications have encoders and decoders for MusicXML text data. This is what makes it possible to exchange notation data between applications.

But there are some limitations. The MusicXML protocol is meant to be universal, so it represents the data in a somewhat literal way. You can see in that screen capture of the code that it’s describing measure 19 and literally listing each element; rhythms, pitches, octaves, voice, lyrics (in this case). The more material in each measure, the longer the coded data is.

There is other data that MusicXML describes as well: system layouts, page layouts, page and system sizes, margins, staff labels, etc. Each notation software represents that data in very different ways, though. Most things are very simple to translate: pitches, rhythms, markings, etc. but other things are more challenging: slash notation, chord symbols, even page text.

Further complicating the matter is that sometimes there are multiple ways to do the same thing. Slash notation in Finale is a great example. Traditionally, you would use a Staff Style, but you can also fake it with stemless notes with an alternate notehead. MusicXML won’t recognize those as the same thing, and importing that type of data in another program might not work as expected.

Another way of saying this is that the more you “fake” stuff in Finale, the less reliable MusicXML will be in representing that data in its interchange format.

In addition, the encoders and decoders in each notation software have some feature variability. Some information in the MusicXML protocol will actually get ignored in each program either because the developers haven’t implemented a specific parameter of the protocol yet, or there’s simply no way to interpret a certain parameter in that program.

For example, although Dorico will decode and import the tokens from the Score Info window in Finale, it doesn’t have a way to implement the location of the actual Page Text blocks yet. Dorico uses a completely different system for handling Page Text which, without getting too much into the details, makes it nearly impossible to do any kind of one to one translation. (If you know Dorico well enough, this will make sense to you: Page Templates and Page Template Sets, Page Overrides with different Text Frames, the Text Frames themselves have boundaries and locks, etc.) We add the caveat “yet” because it’s always possible this is something they will support in the future.

The good news is that because MusicXML was once under the MakeMusic umbrella, and because they paid close attention to it even after it went to the W3C (in large part because of MakeMusic Cloud, the successor to SmartMusic, relies on the MusicXML format), Finale’s MusicXML engine is among the most comprehensive of all the notation software programs! So when you export a MusicXML file from Finale, it will likely have as much information that MusicXML 4.0 will allow for. The other programs might not import everything right now, but there’s a chance that with further development, they could implement more, or eventually all of it.

Obviously, what happens after MusicXML 4.0 will be out of reach for Finale natively, whether that’s a minor bump to MusicXML 4.1 or an entirely new standard. MNX, first conceptually introduced in 2016, and still under pre-release development, may in time succeed MusicXML. Still, if it’s possible to run Finale (see our previous article), it’s conceivable that someone could develop a plug-in for it.

In any event, all of this background is to hopefully manage your expectations when dealing with MusicXML. It is very reliable in getting the core data from one program to another program, and in the more recent versions of MusicXML, there has been some improvement in translating formatting, but it’s not perfect. Just don’t expect to export MusicXML from Finale, import it in another program and magically everything will be fine. Unfortunately, it’s just not that… magical.

What can be said is that simpler, smaller pieces will likely translate more accurately. More complicated pieces, with lots of different types of notations and complex layouts, will more likely require more cleanup work in the new program. In addition, the cleaner the Finale file, the better the MusicXML output will be, and therefore the better the translation will be.

MusicXML Preferences

The first thing to do in Finale is open the MusicXML Preferences. They can be found in the File menu under the Import or Export submenus — both options take you to the same place. It’s the last option in either submenu, called MusicXML Preferences…

Let’s take a look.

We can probably ignore the right-hand side of the window because at this point, we’re likely not dealing much with importing MusicXML files into Finale anymore (but here’s a link to information about XSD and DTD if you can’t help yourself).

So, let’s look at the left side.

You do have the option to choose which version of MusicXML you want to export, although 1.0 and 1.1 will only be available if you choose the uncompressed option at the bottom. There may be some very specific reason to choose one of the older versions, but likely not. The versions were additive, so even if a notation program was only “up to MusicXML 3.0”, you could still open a 4.0 file, it’s just that all the extra data added in the 4.0 protocol will be ignored by the notation software and it will only read the data common through 3.0. In addition, the latest versions of Sibelius, Dorico and MuseScore all support MusicXML 4.0 anyway. There would be very little reason (apart from some really niche scenarios involving some really old versions of software) to choose anything other than 4.0 here.

Further down, you’ll notice options for Export compressed (.mxl) vs. Export uncompressed (.musicxml). The uncompressed MusicXML files uses plain alphanumeric text for the data (as in the earlier example; this is called “verbose”), whereas the compressed version uses a zip-based XML format similar to that used by Open Office and many other XML formats, which makes the entire file a lot smaller in size.

The compressed version also added functionality for Linked Parts. When you choose the compressed version, you’ll notice you get the option to Include linked parts in compressed files a little higher in the window. Another advantage of compressed MusicXML is that embedded graphics are included, although it’s not guaranteed that another notation program you’re importing into will include them. Still, all of the notation applications that translate MusicXML will read the compressed files. Unless you’re possibly interested in opening the text files to directly manipulate the code, (which would be easier to do in an uncompressed file), there’s really not much reason to use the uncompressed format.

When you include the linked parts in the MusicXML file, that will add some formatting data for the parts which could be handy. But not including the linked parts doesn’t mean you won’t get parts. In all the programs, if there’s data in the score, the parts get created automatically from each of the instruments. It’s just that you won’t get any formatting, and you won’t get any special parts, like, for instance a percussion score (which you’d have to manually set up in each program anyway).

In the middle you’ll see an option to Silence error messages when translating a folder to MusicXML. Checking this option will prevent Finale from stopping the process of exporting a folder just so you can clear an error message. If you have this checked, it would be wise to check the log after the process to see if there were any errors. If so, you might have to open those individual files and try to figure out why it may have given you an error.

At the very bottom, there’s the Include subfolders option which is particularly useful if you organize your projects into folders and subfolders. Without that option checked, Finale will only look directly in the folder that you choose when you try to convert a folder to MusicXML.

Exporting MusicXML

Once you have your preferences set the way you want them, exporting MusicXML is rather easy in Finale. If you want to do an individual file, open that file, go to the File menu, choose Export… and choose MusicXML… and it will convert the file according to your preferences.

Finale will give you the opportunity to rename the file, or to relocate the file if you want. Otherwise, the file will get the same name with a different extension. If it’s uncompressed, the extension will be .musicxml; if it’s compressed it will be .mxl.

If you want to translate a whole folder, go to File menu, Export… and choose Translate Folder to MusicXML… (you don’t even have to have a file open to do this). This time it will ask you to choose a folder to convert, but will not give you the opportunity to rename the files or place them in a different folder. Instead, it will put all the MusicXML files right next to the Finale files in the same folder, which is probably the most logical thing to do anyway.

Exporting MusicXML files out of Finale is not instantaneous. Depending on the size and complexity of the file, it can actually take close to a minute. Here’s some testing for reference, on a 2023 MacBook Pro with an M2 Max chip — not the most screaming fast, but not an archaic machine either. The test files were a relatively medium-large orchestral piece and a rather small piano/vocal piece. Here are the results:

Orchestral Score

• File size: 681KB
• Full Score: 249 measures, 58 pages
• 14 Linked Parts
• Compressed with parts took 33 seconds, file size was 600KB
• Uncompressed with no parts took 21 seconds, file size was 6.4MB
• Compressed with no parts also to 21 seconds, file size 259KB

Piano/Vocal piece

• File size: 209KB
• Piano, one vocal staff (no linked parts): 40 bars, 2 pages
• Compressed took less than 1 second, file size was 11KB
• Uncompressed took less than 1 second, file size was 203KB

I then put those two files, as well as six others in a folder to see how long it took to do a folder of Finale files.

• Original folder of Finale files was 8 files totaling 3.1MB
• Compressed with parts took 1:35, combined size of the new files was 1.8MB
• Uncompressed with no parts took 1:14, combined size of the new files was 28.2MB

As you can see, a folder of only eight files took about a minute and a half. If you’ve got hundreds or thousands of Finale files, some back-of-the-napkin math would suggest that it could take hours if not a whole day if you were to manage to get all of your Finale files into a single folder.

It’s probably not a great idea to try to do this anyway. Apart from tying up your computer for the better part of a day, you never know what errors could occur. If Finale crashes in the middle of all of that, you’d have to sort out how far it got and then rerun it without the files that are done. It’s probably better to take smaller bites and run the Translate Folder to MusicXML operation multiple times.

It’s also worth noting the difference in file sizes between the compressed and uncompressed versions. With the exception of the very simple Piano/Vocal piece, all of my tests show that the uncompressed MusicXML files end up being significantly larger than the Finale files themselves. The compressed files, on the other hand, are smaller, sometimes significantly smaller, than the Finale files. These days computer storage is measured in terabytes, so even the larger uncompressed files would barely put a dent in your hard drive, but it adds up, if that’s at all a concern.

Even so, if you end up creating uncompressed MusicXML files or already have some, you can still compress them to greatly reduce their size, using your OS’s built-in compression feature. On Mac, right-click (or Control-click) the file, or selection of files, or folder and choose Compress. On Windows, it’s basically the same: right-click, select Send to, and then select Compressed (zipped) folder. Of course, unlike .mxl files, which can be opened directly by other music notation software, you’ll need to uncompress the zipped folder before importing it into other software.

Export now, import later

The bottom line is that Finale is frozen on MusicXML 4.0, and Finale is the software that potentially will stop functioning after future OS updates, and currently Finale is the only program that has the encoder that will translate a .mus or .musx file into a .musicxml or .mxl file. So we really can’t recommend enough that you start exporting your Finale files to MusicXML as soon as you can.

There’s no harm in doing it now, and there’s zero advantage to waiting. Finale is never going to get MusicXML 4.1 (or MNX), at least without some plug-in or workaround, so 4.0 is as far as you’ll ever get with Finale and MusicXML.

You don’t have to import your files into your new software of choice right away either. In fact, it would be wiser to wait, if you can, because there is a possibility that your new application, still in active development, will improve its MusicXML import! And, as mentioned previously, conversion is not perfect, so you will likely have to make some fixes after importing files into your new program. Further down the road, you’ll know how to use your new program better and that will make the fixes that much easier!

So, our advice is definitely: Export now, import later.

Fonts

In addition to exporting your files as MusicXML, you may want to create PDFs of your files, to preserve them for re-printing or reference, in the event that one day in the future, you can’t open Finale anymore. Remember, exporting even as the most faithful MusicXML file will lose some formatting and visual data, and more “customized” Finale files won’t translate to MusicXML well at all.

Even when exporting to MusicXML, though, some font information will survive, so regardless, before you export to MusicXML, and definitely before you make PDFs (or print archival copies), be sure that you have all of the fonts used in your Finale file, as much as possible.

Finale’s music fonts

We’ve covered this in our previous article, “Using Finale in the unsupported era“, but if you want to ensure that you have all of the music fonts that ever came with Finale — follow this link to the official MakeMusic page containing the installers for Mac and Windows.

This includes not just the “Finale” SMuFL fonts introduced in Finale 27, but the older fonts as well, such as the Maestro, Engraver, and Jazz fonts (and their various constituent fonts, i.e., Maestro Wide, Maestro Percussion, Engraver Font Extras, etc.); Petrucci; Broadway Copyist; and even specialty fonts like Seville and Tamburo.

You can read more about this topic right here on Scoring Notes, including how to use the “Finale” SMuFL fonts in Dorico, if you have a particular house style that you’re fond of and wish to re-create that look in Dorico (or any other software that uses the SMuFL standard).

Other music fonts and text fonts

If you never deviated from using music fonts that were provided with Finale, then this alone should cover you. However, over time there have been many other purveyors of music fonts that worked with Finale, either to replace the default music font, or to provide specialty notation.

The same is true for text fonts: Old stalwarts like Times New Roman and Helvetica will show up just fine. But the farther afield you go, the more oddities may arise.

Finale will tell you if a font is missing, if you look in the Text > Font menu. The missing font(s) will be italicized and appended with the word “(missing)”. Finale will substitute the font with something else, but if the font used its own custom scheme for displaying characters, you may get nonsense-looking output.

The first order of business would be to try to locate the missing fonts, and install them on your computer, and restart Finale. It’s possible you may have an old font file in a folder somewhere, and when you updated your latest computer it never got installed. Search your files to find the missing font.

The next step is to search the internet to see what’s available. This gets into a gray area sometimes, and we’re not going to recommend too many specific sites or approaches here. The safest approach is to download the missing font(s) from a highly reputable site, and adhere to the license terms provided. Just because a site offers “free” fonts doesn’t mean they’re legal or safe to use.

Certainly Google Fonts is reputable, and the fonts there are free to download to use. Consult the license(s) provided for specific terms.

If you have a subscription to an Adobe Creative Cloud application, like Acrobat or Photoshop, you have access to Adobe Fonts, with tens of thousands of fonts available for personal and commercial project. It’s possible that the missing font in your Finale project may be available through Adobe, and you can subscribe for as little as one month to have access to all of the fonts.

Your ability to use the fonts licensed by Adobe Fonts expires once your subscription lapses, but if you create a PDF, the font will be embedded in the PDF, preserving the look of the file even after the font is disabled on your computer.

Beyond those highly reputable sources, you may need to do some sleuthing to find your missing font(s), and while it’s beyond the scope of this article to attempt to list them all, we’d just recommend that you ensure that you have the rights to use whatever fonts you may (re)-acquire.

Substituting fonts

If all else fails and you can’t find the original font used in your project, and you need to create an archival copy of it, you have a few options.

In the case of a third-party music font that adhered to the same codepoints that Finale used for its music fonts, it may be enough to simply head to Document > Set Default Music Font… and select Maestro or another official MakeMusic font. Although you’ll lose the specific flourishes of your preferred music font, hopefully the music will at least be legible and appear correctly.

For instances where you don’t have a particular text font and can’t find the exact replacement, a suitable alternative may adequately suffice. In this example, the main text font used in the file is “New Century Schlbk”, which isn’t present on this computer:

But, as a loyal Scoring Notes reader, you may know that there are a number of free alternatives to the various “Century Schoolbook” fonts. One of them is Academico, which comes bundled with Dorico, the Scoring Express templates for Sibelius, and elsewhere.

In Finale, use Document > Data Check > Font Utilities to easily swap one for the other:

This one step quickly substituted all instances of “New Century Schlbk” with “Academico” in text blocks, lyrics, expressions, and elsewhere. You may need to do this several times for each font in your document that you wish to replace, but eventually you may be able to closely replicate the appearance of your original file.

There is also Text Search & Replace, found in Finale’s Edit menu, where you can get more granular with regard to what is and isn’t replaced. This approach will be helpful for specialty fonts, like the “Metronome” font used in the earlier example, if you can’t locate the font. If you can sort out what the “human-readable” string was supposed to be, you can run a search on those items and replace it with different text, and a different font, style, and size, so that the end result appears the same. You can optionally only choose certain areas of the program, whether or not you only want to replace whole words, and more.

Our late, great colleague Robert Puff, some years ago, assembled a list of music fonts for Finale. Although the list is outdated now, it’s actually amazingly useful as a historical reference, and may help you find, or least offer leads to some of the more obscure specialty fonts that were once used in Finale, especially in older documents.

Archiving Finale files as PDF files

If you were hoping to find The One True Way of archiving Finale files as PDFs en masse, sadly, we haven’t found it.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t archive your Finale files as PDFs — just that there isn’t an obvious or easy way to do it for a mass quantity of files. If we’re wrong about this, please let us know!

But, at least it is possible to make PDFs of all of the parts in a single file in one step.

Printing to PDF

If you use Finale, you have most likely created PDFs of your Finale files before, probably by using the File > Print dialog, using the built-in PDF printer on Mac or Windows. This is the only way to make PDFs of all or some of the linked parts in a file, as well as the score, in one go.

A few things to keep in mind:

Paper Size: Be sure that it matches the page size of the document (score or part) that you’re printing to PDF. If your score is a different size than your parts, you’ll need to run this more than once with only the desired score/part(s) selected; see the next step.

Finale Print Options: Use this to make a PDF of only the score, only the parts, or some subset. The embedded window doesn’t resize, so be sure to scroll all the way through. The buttons Check All, Check None, and Check Current (the score/part currently in view) can be helpful. The spin boxes for quantities don’t do anything if you’re printing to PDF; they’re only for printing physical copies to a printer.

Generally uncheck everything else unless you have a good reason. This includes unchecking Use RGB if you’re on Mac, which was one of the very last improvements added to Finale, in the 27.4 update, and is yet another good reason among others to update to Finale v. 27.4.1 for all of your archiving business. This avoids the longstanding issue of PDFs made from Finale appearing as a dark shade of grey instead of true black for some Mac users.

The process of “printing” all of these PDFs is quick enough — you’ll likely see a pop-up briefly flash on the screen corresponding to each part in your file. Once you have your PDFs made, they will appear in your file browser in alphabetical order, prepending with the file name:

Give a gift to your future self (and anyone else who may need to work with these files) and use a file renamer, like Name Mangler, to organize these into score order.

 

Exporting to PDF using the Graphics Tool

In true Finale form, there is more than one way to make a PDF of a Finale document. You can, alternatively, use the Export Pages… feature, found in the Graphics Tool.

If you choose PDF, there’s not anything else to select (other than a subset of pages); PDFs are resolution-independent, so that option is greyed out, and since you can only export one file at a time (with multiple pages contained in the file), there’s no option to generate sequential names, like you would if you were exporting, say, a JPEG of each page.

Before 27.4.1, this was the way of ensuring that the PDF you generated from Finale was true black. However, the severe limitation to this method is that you can only do it for the currently viewed score/part. Unless…

Using FinaleScript and macro programs

Here we get into the wonderful (?) land of FinaleScript and third-party macro programs, like Keyboard Maestro. But before you brace yourself, we’re not going to dive deep. We’re simply going to mention that there are ways, some more reliable than others, of using or writing macros to help automate the process, either through the printing to PDF method, or the exporting as graphic method.

MakeMusic actually offers a FinaleScript that you can download to batch export a folder of Finale files to PDFs; this is actually just a slightly modified version of the Batch Save as Graphic FinaleScript that comes with Finale. A better version is provided here by Heine Svendsen, so that you don’t need to actively click “OK” and “Save” on every file. However, these scripts only work on the score of each file; not the parts. So, while this is not an ideal option in all instances, it may work for you, so try it out.

On Scoring Notes, in the same article in which we documented the “true black” issue before it was resolved by MakeMusic, we also provided a Keyboard Maestro script for exporting parts to PDF, courtesy of Finale user and Scoring Notes reader Doug Bakkum.

Of course, this is a Mac-only solution, since you need Keyboard Maestro, which is a Mac-only program, and the script is quite complicated and subject to the vagaries of your computer setup. But, it’s another option available.

You could also use Keyboard Maestro or another macro program to automate the Print to PDF option; that approach appears to be the one demonstrated in this video made by Kevin Lynch, again, with a number of caveats to be aware of.

Editing PDFs later

One advantage to archiving Finale files as PDFs is that PDFs can still be edited — just not as easily as you can edit a native notation file. So, if you ever need to modify those files later, and you don’t have Finale, you may be able to make do with a PDF editor.

Printing (to paper), etc.

There is also the printing to paper option, if you really want to cover all of your bases. Preferably acid-free and stored in a fire-proof case…

And, if for whatever reason you don’t trust that the PDF will have embedded all of your fonts and other musical thingamajiggs correctly, you could export the PDF or the Finale file in some image format like PNG at a high enough resolution (1200).

In any event, PDF is really the only practical way to archive your Finale projects for the very long term, exactly as they were intended to appear, without needing to open Finale to see and print them. So, be sure you’ve followed our earlier advice to set yourself up for as much success here as you hope to achieve.

 

Moving on

It’s possible that you’ve already decided on the Finale alternative that works best for you. If so, that’s great, and we hope it’s working well for you. Drop us a note in the comments to let us know.

If you’re still holding out, but are looking for some guidance, there are a few factors you may wish to consider.

The “big three”

The leading “traditional” desktop applications now are Dorico, MuseScore, and Sibelius, listed purely in alphabetical order. All three are owned by private companies, and their business strategies differ. It’s impossible to know how long any of them will exist, but for now, they are all being actively developed. For what it’s worth, these are the three applications that we do our best to keep up with most regularly on Scoring Notes, and you’ll find long histories of each in our Product Guide.

These applications are the most extensive in terms of their feature sets, and while they differ significantly the deeper you get into them, for most users, most of the time, they will all do what Finale was able to do. We know that there may be a feature(s) in one or the other that Finale did or didn’t do; no need to alert us to that here. We’re talking in generalizations!

They also benefit from active, large communities that are likely to come to your aid when you need assistance. Similarly, if you have a need to collaborate with other users, it won’t be difficult to find others that use the software.

In our experience at the moment, Sibelius and Dorico are the applications employed most often by professional-level users; i.e., people making a living using notation software, like composers, arrangers, orchestrators, copyists, engravers, publishers, and librarians. In fact, Finale itself is still being used more than MuseScore in these areas, and in some instances, even more than Sibelius or Dorico. That’s not to say that MuseScore or other software isn’t being used, or can’t be used at this level; we (Jason and Philip) are just reporting on our mutual experience in the industry at this exact moment in time.

MuseScore Studio (the official name of the product, as distinct from the MuseScore service) is free of charge. There’s no harm in downloading it, trying it out, and keeping up with updates. They have published an extensive development road map, and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

Dorico and Sibelius each have free versions (Dorico SE and Sibelius First), which are limited in editing features and number of staves that can be created, among other items, but they each allow you to open a file created in their “bigger sibling” tiers, and view, play back, and print those files, facilitating collaboration.

The intermediate tiers, which offer some, but not all of the programs’ features, are Dorico Elements and Sibelius Artist, respectively; the top-level tiers are Dorico Pro and Sibelius Ultimate, which is what we most often cover here, since they are the “complete” products. Those top-level tiers are the ones eligible for the crossgrade from Dorico, and, for $150 or less, they are very reasonably priced for what they can accomplish. If you decide to invest money in one or more of these programs, and are eligible for the crossgrade, we see little reason to get the intermediate tier — just go for the top tier so you have full access to all of the features. They also have time-limited trial versions that you can test out before purchase.

Other desktop products

We do know that there are other desktop products out there, like Capella, Notion, Forte, LilyPond, and more. These programs have niche and loyal followings, and if they interest you, by all means, contact those developers and talk to someone who uses the software to learn more about them. So that we don’t make a long article even longer, we’ll leave it there.

Browser-based software

There is this amazing thing called the internet, and there are web browsers that can “surf the web”, and you can even run applications within your browser! Have you heard?

Seriously, if you use tools like Google Docs or Sheets, or any one of the thousands of other browser-based apps out there, you may be thinking, is there something like that for music notation?

In fact, there are several of them. Noteflight, Soundslice, and Flat are among the leading products in this space. If you don’t see the need to install music notation software on your computer anymore, it will be well-worth your time investigating these products to see if one or more of them is a good fit for you.

For what it may be worth, Noteflight is a Hal Leonard product, which in turn is owned by Muse Group; Soundslice is owned by Adrian Holovaty, who is also one of the co-chairs of the W3C Music Notation Community Group; and Flat is made by a small company called Tutteo.

Other options

Instead of diving headstrong into another program, this juncture may be a good opportunity for you to take a breather and ask how and why you use music notation software in the first place. Finale was created in the era of bulky desktop computers, slow (or no) internet, printed music, and expensive recording studios.

Fast forward a generation. Mobile is king and it’s easier than ever to create near-studio-quality content in your home. Dorico, Sibelius and MuseScore all offer mobile apps to some degree, and while it’s remarkable what these apps are capable of, for many users those products are still fundamentally oriented to the desktop with printing or print-like workflows. If that’s how you still use software, one of those three will be your likely home.

But if you don’t primarily use notation software in this way and don’t need the levels of fine engraving options and deep workflows they offer, one of the browser-based apps, or the mobile versions of Dorico, Sibelius and MuseScore will be more portable and flexible for you.

Do you use music notation software more for audio playback and demos? Again, the desktop apps are very capable here, and still improving all the time. But if notation is secondary to you, Cubase and Logic are among the DAWs that have respectable notation capabilities — especially Cubase 14, with its Dorico-powered score editor.

Whatever your situation, there’s no reason to bemoan the end of Finale. You have options.

Finally, we’d also like to acknowledge all of the countless people that have kept Finale going for as long as it did! The original designers, the hundreds of programmers over the past 35 years, the plug-in developers, and of course the incredible community of passionate Finale users who have shared their expertise and “hacks” for decades! We have gotten to know many of you and we have thoroughly enjoyed the ride. We hope you’ve enjoyed this series of articles, and we welcome your comments below.

Now it’s time to bid our friend farewell. So long, Noteman! Enjoy your retirement, you deserve it!