This article has been updated.
MakeMusic, the Louisville, Colorado-based music technology company, announced today that it would cease development of Finale, its flagship desktop application for music notation, and will no longer sell it directly or allow it to be sold via resellers, effective immediately. In doing so it has entered into an agreement with Steinberg Media Technologies, the Hamburg, Germany-based musical software and hardware company, endorsing a path for Finale users to obtain Dorico Pro at a heavily discounted price of $149. 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. (Dorico Pro retails for $580 and the usual crossgrade price from a competing product is $300.) The offer is available immediately, and, according to MakeMusic, only for a limited time.
Listen to the podcast episode
MakeMusic has discontinued development of Finale after 36 years and has endorsed a crossgrade to Steinberg’s Dorico software. On the Scoring Notes podcast, Jason Loffredo joins David MacDonald and Philip Rothman to discuss the news, and what it means for the companies and their customers. Listen now:
For Finale customers wishing to continue to use Finale, official support for the product will end one year from today. Beyond then, Finale may continue to be used for as long as the hardware and operating system will run it, but no updates or fixes are planned.
When first making the announcement on August 26, 2024, 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,” but that that future OS changes could still impact a user’s ability to use Finale on new devices.
Further, although the company originally announced that it was not possible to upgrade an earlier version (v26 or earlier) of Finale to version 27, MakeMusic revised this on August 27 to make Finale v27 available to its customers who purchase the special Dorico Pro crossgrade from Finale, and by the end of the week, on August 30, the option took effect in the MakeMusic store. “We’re excited to announce that Finale v27 is now available to all customers who purchase or have already purchased a Dorico Pro crossgrade. As a reminder, all Finale customers can purchase Dorico Pro for just $149 (75% off the retail price) for a limited time,” the company said in an email to customers. “Having access to Finale v27 will ensure that you can export your Finale files to Dorico using MusicXML 4.0, the most robust version of MusicXML available.”
Avid responds with special crossgrade offer for Finale customers
On August 30, 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, on September 5, 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!”
As before, verification of a Finale serial number is required, but surrendering the license to the Finale software is not required in order for the crossgrade customer to take advantage of the offer, and the offer does not preclude an eligible customer from also securing the Dorico crossgrade from MakeMusic as well.
Capella crossgrade offer
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.
“Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry”
In a statement announcing this news and emailed to Finale customers, Greg Dell’Era, the president of MakeMusic and Alfred Music said, “Four decades is a very long time in the software industry. Technology stacks change, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale’s millions of lines of code add up. This has made the delivery of incremental value for our customers exponentially harder over time. Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry — a reality after 35 years, and I want to be candid about this. Instead of releasing new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we’ve made the decision to end its development. I am convinced Steinberg’s Dorico is the best home for our loyal Finale users, and is the bright future of the music notation industry.”
In a more lengthy letter directly addressed to Finale users, Dell’Era wholeheartedly endorsed Dorico. “Many have competed with Finale over the past four decades, enabling positive and healthy stimulation leading to incremental innovations, but when Dorico launched in 2016, it set a brand new bar for the industry. The dozens of quick releases since then have demonstrated the Dorico team’s passion, dedication, expertise, and long-term commitment—qualities that have been the foundation of Finale’s DNA and success,” Dell’Era said. “Dorico is the best home for Finale users.”
Clyde Sendke, Steinberg’s managing director, said, “We look forward to welcoming many Finale users into the Dorico user community. Although we know it is difficult to leave behind a trusted tool, we are confident that they will soon come to rely on the powerful, efficient workflows provided by Dorico Pro. Our team will be by their side at every step to provide help and support.”
Daniel Spreadbury, Steinberg’s product marketing manager. said the following a blog post announcing the news: “We are very pleased that the teams at MakeMusic and Steinberg have been able to join forces to provide a pathway for Finale users to continue their musical journey with Dorico Pro. Thousands of Finale users have already successfully crossgraded to Dorico over the years, and we are confident that Dorico Pro can be a worthy successor to Finale for many thousands more.”
To that end, Steinberg has published a new series of tutorial videos authored by Ben Byram-Wigfield, for many years a Finale expert user who has switched to using Dorico. (Ben is a regular contributor to Scoring Notes.) Steinberg has also published a series of FAQs, and plans to unveil additional resources for new customers.
MakeMusic has also published a summary of information on its Finale web site where Finale was formerly available for purchase, as well as a more detailed series of FAQs.
Quick links
From MakeMusic:
- Finale official page
- Letter from Greg Dell’Era, president of MakeMusic and Alfred Music, to Finale users
- Finale Sunset FAQs
- MakeMusic store
From Steinberg:
- Making Notes blog post by Daniel Spreadbury
- Video tutorials, “Switching from Finale to Dorico”
- Finale to Dorico FAQs
- Dorico official forum
The end of an era
Although it was not the first music notation software program ever created, Finale was the first to gain a critical mass of users, coinciding with the increasing ubiquity of personal computers and music technology in the late 1980s and 1990s available to home, educational, and professional users. Finale’s broad appeal led to its wide adoption, establishing its dominance in an emerging and growing market for music notation software in the early 1990s.
Reviewing Finale for Sound on Sound in March and April 1989, Kendall Wrightson wrote, “Around February 1988 a rumor emerged from the States that there was a Macintosh program that transcribed directly from a MIDI keyboard and displayed the music immediately onscreen. It wasn’t until the following June that Coda Music Software gave the first trade demonstrations of Finale at the NAMM show in Atlanta. Few people in the business had heard anything of Coda or of Finale’s chief architect, Phil Farrand. Yet from the size of Coda’s stand at the show, and the high quality of their brochures, it was clear that serious money had been spent and that a major marketing exercise was under way.”
Released in 1988 on Mac (the Windows version followed in 1990), Finale 1.0 was created by Phil Farrand, who recalled being frustrated at the laborious process of writing and preparing a piece of notated music for production and publication. “I thought, there has got to be a better way to do this. Someday somebody surely is going to have a program that you can play on a keyboard and write out the music. I started thinking about it and started making some sketches in some books, and I thought, ‘I can do this’.”
Farrand and his collaborator, software engineer and developer John Borowicz, refined a concept to undergird Finale, known as ENIGMA. The mysterious-sounding name was actually an acronym for “Environment for Notation Intuitive Graphic Music Algorithms”. Technology was nascent at the time, and other programs conceived or developed in that period tended to focus on one type of hardware, one type of music entry method, or only one step in the music creation process.
Finale, on the other hand, pioneered an “all of the above” approach across platforms that encompassed composing, transcription, playback, graphical notation, printing, and output for publication. Borowicz said that “ENIGMA is constructed such that we aren’t tied to any particular platform or to any particular product whatsoever. We determined that when we started ENIGMA, that we weren’t going to be concerned about hardware constraints at all. We were going to build it the way we thought it should be built. We were going to be true to the vision. If you can do that, then you can build something that’s truly portable across hardware.”
That comprehensive approach to both music creation and the underlying transportable architecture propelled Finale to dominate the emerging market for music notation software on both Mac and Windows. Writing about the state of the industry in The New York Times in 2001, journalist Marcia Biederman quoted composer Elliott Miles McKinley’s recollection that Finale “blew everything else off the planet” upon its first release.
Meanwhile, working separately in Cambridge, England, without much knowledge of Finale — it was the early 1990s, before the internet was widely used — brothers Ben and Jonathan Finn created a new program that they named Sibelius and released in 1993. Unlike Finale, it was tied to a particular hardware product, the Acorn computer. Acorn was all but unknown outside the UK, and this limited its broader appeal.
Seeking a worldwide market, the Finns rewrote the program from scratch for Windows, releasing it in 1998 and following quickly with a Mac version in 1999. Finale had a serious rival for the first time.
Biederman characterized Sibelius as “a feisty contender,” and in the course of her reporting observed that each program’s users “voiced strong opinions about the other’s choice of software,” and that “such partisanship is not uncommon in musicians’ circles.”
With each program aiming to outdo the other with every new release, the competition entered the mainstream as leading schools and institutions committed to one program or the other at an institutional level, even as their faculty and students would use both products. In time, Finale’s market share began to erode, and in 2003 Sibelius claimed the position as the worldwide market leader. The fierce rivalry ensued for more than a decade.
But as technologies changed, so did the ecosystem, affecting everyone from the casual user all the way to the corporate suite, where companies underwent mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation. New products came onto the scene, and the inexorable rise in mobile and cloud computing fundamentally altered the ways in which many people interact with digital music.
While the traditional market of desktop notation software has persisted, in the mid 2010s products like MuseScore on the low-end, and Dorico on the high-end (both in features and price) continued to squeeze what had by now become a saturated market. Still, Finale remained in continuous development from version 1.0, released in 1988, through version 27.4, released in November 2023.
The Finale enigma
Finale has always had a well-deserved reputation as a powerful but complicated program — a reputation that was reinforced from its early days by Phil Farrand himself. “Finale is very extensive,” Farrand said upon its release in 1988. “It has a number of tools — and they’re deep tools. There’s going to be a a lot of time that [users] need to spend with it to learn how to use the tools, and it will pay them in the long run to do that.”
Farrand wanted the reward to be worth the effort, and he sought to achieve a high-quality end result from the sprawling program. Steve Peha, the designer of Petrucci, the first font created explicitly for Finale, recalled, “Phil needed to tune the placement of symbols under a variety of different circumstances. It took many, many printouts to get everything right, and at certain points, he asked me to make small adjustments to certain symbols, usually to move them up or down by a fraction of a point or so.”
Perhaps no resource better exemplifies the power and complexity than Jason Loffredo’s epic “Conquering Finale” series of video tutorials: 28 (and counting) in-depth playlists, each comprising multiple episodes, exploring every nook and cranny of the program. The notion of software that must be conquered is daunting, but it has allowed Finale to retain eminence in segments of the market that push both notation and the software to its limits, such as contemporary music publishing, recording sessions for movies and other media, and Broadway/musical theatre production.
Despite Finale’s prominence and impressive results, from a strategic standpoint, it does not align with the rest of MakeMusic’s modern offerings of interactive practice solutions and its music catalog.
This course was set in 2015, when MakeMusic — now owned by Peaksware — acquired Weezic, a Paris-based maker of an interactive web-based music practice tool. Weezic eventually replaced SmartMusic, which was MakeMusic’s venerated learning and assessment tool.
SmartMusic was an installable desktop application based on Finale, but was becoming outdated as the education market needed to transition to web-based platforms like Weezic that could run on Chromebooks and other devices. Weezic’s co-founder, Greg Dell’Era, joined MakeMusic as director of technology at the time of the acquisition, and since January 2021 has been president of both MakeMusic and Alfred Music.
Indeed, SmartMusic — rebranded in 2022 as MakeMusic Cloud — hasn’t shared any code with Finale since 2020, when the desktop version of SmartMusic was officially discontinued after having co-existed during a four-year transition period alongside the cloud-based version. MakeMusic Cloud relies on MusicXML to generate its content, which can be created in virtually any music notation software.
As Finale became anachronistic in MakeMusic’s strategic plan, any development time spent on Finale at the expense of its MakeMusic Cloud products was effectively a money-loser for MakeMusic — especially since Finale has never been a subscription product and thus there is no recurring revenue stream that can be tapped to fund ongoing development.
When viewed through this lens, the business case for winding down Finale makes sense. But how to do it in a way that leverages Finale’s value and offers its customers a way forward?
The business case
There have been dozens, if not hundreds of programs developed over time for the express purpose of creating music notation. Most have been abandoned, due to a lack of time, interest, profitability, or — unfortunately — illness or death of the person(s) responsible for maintaining the software.
In the case of proprietary software, its users often have no choice but to move on and figure out an alternative. (QuicKeys, a macro program enjoyed by many Finale users, ended this way, and many of its users ultimately recreated their workflows from scratch in Keyboard Maestro.)
If there is a proprietary file format associated with the software, there are more outcomes still. In the best case, the file format becomes open even if the software is discontinued or otherwise changes, so that users can continue their work in a program of their choice without starting over or performing a conversion. (Microsoft’s Office Open XML and Adobe’s PDF are two common examples where the software made by those companies remains proprietary, but the file format they created is open.) In other cases, the main file format remains proprietary but conversion to another format is possible, with the loss of data often a consequence of such action.
Sometimes, the software itself becomes free, open source, or both, and either the entire program or some of its components are released to the public so that others can use it regardless of the state of its official development.
An analysis
So what’s happening here?
MakeMusic has immediately stopped making Finale available. Not for sale; not for free; not open source.
Naturally, for this agreement to appeal to Steinberg, it is a reasonable inference that this is a condition of the parties’ agreement. After all, Steinberg doesn’t want more users of another software — they want more Dorico users. They’re already competing with Sibelius and MuseScore.
Finale costs MakeMusic money. While there may be some value it its code, it’s not special the way it was in 1988. Nearly everything Finale can do can be done, in many cases better and faster, by more modern software, like Dorico.
What is of value, though, to both MakeMusic and Steinberg, are Finale’s customers.
Often a company will capture customers through one product and be able to sell other products or services to them. But it’s unlikely there is much overlap between a regular desktop Finale music notation user and the customers MakeMusic seeks for its MakeMusic Cloud learning, assessment and content tools. At the very least, there is surely no migration path from Finale to any one of those tools.
But a Finale customer who has seen their favorite product reach its end-of-life needs an alternative. Rather than allowing the value of that customer to dissipate into the open market, Finale is, in a way, offering them one more upgrade. Instead of Finale version 28, though, it’s Dorico Pro 5.
Both companies stand to benefit financially from encouraging Finale users to make the transition to Dorico, in different ways. One analysis is that it is a short-term play by MakeMusic and a long-term play by Steinberg.
For MakeMusic, they hope to get a temporary boost to the bottom line in return for proactively steering their customers to Dorico.
Steinberg is sacrificing immediate profit from selling crossgrades directly, likely to pursue a strategy that those Finale users will become permanent Steinberg customers. Those customers can be sold not only future Dorico desktop upgrades, but also more fully integrated into the Steinberg world of pro music and audio with products such as Dorico for iPad, Cubase, Nuendo, virtual instruments, and more.
The transition for users
No Finale user is obligated to crossgrade to Dorico, of course. The user could stick with Finale for as long as the road may go. Avid or Muse Group may make a renewed pitch to these users for Sibelius and MuseScore, respectively. And there are many other desktop, mobile, and browser-based notation products that may be a good fit for certain Finale users, such as Notion, Soundslice, Flat.io, Capella, Guitar Pro, or Noteflight.
But by officially partnering with MakeMusic, Steinberg is best positioned to capture the Finale base. With its videos and FAQs ready out of the gate, more resources to come, and a robust support community comprised of official representatives and active users, Finale users are likely to find a lot of value for a $149 investment in Dorico.
The Dorico development team’s lineage traces back to Sibelius when, in 2012, Avid fired many of its employees in a restructuring attempt, including the majority of the Sibelius team, and Steinberg hired them to begin development on a new notation program that would eventually become Dorico. Despite that shared history with Sibelius, in many ways the Dorico experience is more Finale-like, in the best sense, with its nearly endless options for customization and user preference. Dorico’s separation of the working modes and its various palettes may well appeal to the Finale user accustomed to switching among many deep tools to achieve a comparable level of sophistication.
SMuFL
The last major upgrade to Finale came in June 2021 with Finale version 27, with several smaller updates over the past couple of years. The two major features introduced in Finale v27 were support for Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) and the introduction of MusicXML 4.0.
Although it wasn’t envisioned at the time, these additions to Finale will make it easier for Finale users to migrate to Dorico. With SMuFL, Finale embraced a specification first initiated by Steinberg in 2013 for use in Dorico and since adopted by many other software programs, including MuseScore Studio (but not Sibelius).
In doing so, and especially with the 27.1 update, MakeMusic provided a way for users to convert their Finale files that use Finale’s legacy fonts and codepoints to more modern files that use SMuFL and SMuFL fonts.
Not only does Finale now use SMuFL fonts, but it created new versions of its fonts and released them under the SIL Open Font License, which means that anyone can use them, freely distribute them, and even bundle them with other software. Indeed, if you have Dorico 5.0 or later, you’ll find that you already have many of Finale’s SMuFL fonts like Finale Maestro, Finale Ash, Finale Broadway and Finale Jazz, because Steinberg now bundles them with Dorico. And any other Finale fonts you may have as a result of a Finale installation will also appear for your use in Dorico.
There are also a wide variety of third-party SMuFL fonts available, including November 2 and Nor Eddine Bahha’s NorFonts, that work equally well in Finale and Dorico, and can be used to customize a house style that survives a migration from Finale to Dorico.
This means that, if you so choose, you should be able to achieve with Dorico a very reasonable facsimile of any house styles you may have created in Finale, by replicating the same music and text fonts and choosing engraving settings to suit your taste.
MusicXML
The file format is another matter. No program other than Finale will open the .musx or .mus file formats that are native to Finale. If you use Finale, you may have a repository of Finale files dating back anywhere from 30 days to 30 years.
If preserving access to those files is important to you, you may have to invest some time and money in a solution to convert those files to another format. To be clear, Finale will likely run for many years after 2025, but it will no longer be supported, and your ability to run it on a new computer may be limited, if changes in the operating system prevent it.
If you plan to work with your files in Dorico, or any other music notation software for that matter, exporting as MusicXML is a necessity (File > MusicXML…). MusicXML is an open standard used by hundreds of music applications, and has been for many years effectively integrated into Finale, owing to MakeMusic’s acquisition of Michael Good’s company Recordare in 2011. Michael, the inventor of MusicXML, was a MakeMusic vice president and also one of the original co-chairs of the W3C group that manages MusicXML’s development until his retirement in January 2023.
Fortunately, Finale v27 was the first major product to adopt the MusicXML 4.0 specification, which was released on June 1, 2021 and included many major features that made sharing music notation files among different products easier than before. It added or greatly improved support for:
- Concert scores with transposed parts
- Relationships between score and parts, including a standard way to combine score and parts in a single compressed .mxl file
- Score following, assessment, and other machine listening applications
- Swing playback
- Roman numerals and Nashville numbers
- XML Catalogs
- Complete documentation on the W3C site, including examples of every MusicXML element
In addition, there were many smaller changes for improving the semantics, appearance, and playback that can be represented directly in MusicXML files.
Scoring Notes will cover best practices on how to archive and convert Finale files in a forthcoming post. But if you’re eager to get started, in addition to exporting MusicXML, you should make PDFs of any Finale scores and parts you wish to preserve. This won’t make them editable in other software, but it will ensure that you have an easy way to print or share the way your Finale file looks at this time. You can either print as PDF or use the Graphics tool and select Export Pages… and choose Type: PDF.
If playback or sequencing is important to you, the next step would be to make MIDI files from any Finale file you wish to preserve (File > Export > MIDI File…). You’ll lose virtually all important notation information, but if you’ve set up your file to be shared with sequencers and have automated MIDI information in your file, you’ll want to keep a version of it handy. Likewise, if you’ve made any meaningful alterations to your file to achieve a good playback result, be sure to save an audio file in WAV, AIFF, or MP3 format (File > Export > Audio File…).
Competition and product portfolios
With business, as with music, timing is everything. It remains to be seen how these developments will affect the industry, and if they will do so in the way that MakeMusic and Steinberg intend. But it appears to be the right move at the right time.
Finale fans will bemoan the end of their favorite software, and learning a new program will be challenging. But there are plenty of options available. Steinberg and MakeMusic hope those users choose Dorico, a product entering its tenth year in the market with the most advanced feature set of any music notation software.
With MakeMusic exiting the desktop music notation market, they no longer compete directly with Steinberg. But both companies are competing with Muse Group in different areas.
Muse Group’s acquisition of Hal Leonard last year created a combined company squarely occupying the same space as MakeMusic. The recent launch of Muse Class is aimed at the same classroom market where MakeMusic and its Alfred Music division has excelled with its classroom and practice tools married with its extensive catalog of compositions and method books. MakeMusic has recently announced partnerships with Disney Music Group, and exclusive deals inked just in the last year with RWS, Keiser, Tyler S. Grant, and Carl Fischer/Presser/BriLee.
In the music notation software space, Steinberg’s Dorico competes with Muse Group’s MuseScore Studio. Other areas of competition with Muse include Audacity and Muse Sounds with Steinberg’s Nuendo and virtual instrument offerings. StaffPad, also a part of Muse Group, could be considered both an alternative and a complement to Dorico’s iPad app.
With many of Muse’s tools available free of charge, they have gained a large user base, albeit one whose users are generally less demanding of the software. The number of MuseScore users dwarfs that of Finale, Dorico, and Sibelius combined, but you’re far less likely to encounter a score generated from MuseScore in a professional concert hall, recording studio, or publication, for good reason. Despite the major improvements made in MuseScore 4 in late 2022, and subsequent regular updates since, MuseScore — now known as MuseScore Studio since May of this year — is still catching up to the other three programs in features and reliability.
Let’s not forget Dorico’s competition with Sibelius — still the market leader when it comes to commercial (i.e., paid) music notation software. There was a time, as mentioned earlier, where Finale users actively switched to Sibelius in large numbers, but it still is a totally viable option for today’s Finale user seeking a new home. Sibelius still enjoys active development, a large installed base, a mobile app that runs on iOS, iPad, and, new this year, Android. Its subscription plans provide Avid with a recurring revenue stream.
There is a certain amount of irony in Sibelius — the once-“feisty” software — being marketed as “time-tested,” but it is accurate. Sibelius users who are happy with the product have little incentive to switch to Dorico.
The same is true for Pro Tools, where Steinberg also competes with Avid with both Cubase and Nuendo. These mature tools have many entrenched users for whom switching holds little appeal.
Given the difficulty of acquiring “switchers” organically, and the alliance the companies have with respect to their mutual competition, the timing is right for Steinberg to encourage Finale users to migrate to Dorico Pro and all of the advanced features it offers, and for MakeMusic to endorse such a move. At $149, it is the lowest price for a new Dorico Pro license, and it’s exclusively available to Finale users.
Still, MuseScore and Sibelius are formidable competitors in a crowded, niche market. On one side is MuseScore. Whatever its current limitations are as a product, as one industry veteran put it to Scoring Notes, “It is very difficult to compete with free.” On the other side is Sibelius. There is safety in numbers, and Sibelius has plenty of them.
Predicting the future and reflecting on the past
As the era of Finale comes to a close, it’s worth reflecting upon the predictions that a couple of early pioneers made about music notation software.
In a 2015 interview with Scoring Notes, Ben Finn, who, along with his brother Jonathan, invented Sibelius, gave one of the most astute and prescient analyses of the market he was responsible for exponentially growing. “I surmise that when Steinberg comes out with their new program,” Finn said a year before the release of Dorico 1.0, “having three really strong programs in the market will be more than enough, and will make it pretty much impossible for anyone else to enter the market with a professional program. Though it may not make it impossible for someone to survive in the market with an app that does lots of useful stuff but is not comprehensive. But in terms of comprehensive professional-quality music notation, I can’t see how you could ever have more than three. Because you have to make money, and you have to pay staff. You can’t do that unless you have market share and are making some serious money.”
Jim Romeo worked on the early version of Finale and contributed to its development and documentation. “Every musical period develops over a course of time — years, sometimes decades,” Romeo said in 1988, at the time of Finale’s debut. “But usually historians will look back and find a single defining event to say, ‘that’s when the period began or ended.’ For example, 1750 is the death of Bach; it’s the end of the Baroque period. I think that historians 50 years from now, 100 years from now, will look back on 1988 — the introduction of Finale — and say that was this moment when a new period really began in music history.”
Article updates (most recent first)
September 10, 2024 at 10:10 am. News about Capella discounted competitive crossgrade offer.
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.
September 5, 2024 at 1:29 pm. News about Avid discounted competitive crossgrade offer to Sibelius Ultimate for perpetual licenses.
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.
August 31, 2024 at 10:10 am. News about Avid discounted competitive crossgrade offer to Sibelius Ultimate:
Avid responded to the news by dropping the price of its competitive crossgrade from $120 to $99 for a 1-year subscription to Sibelius Ultimate, a 20% reduction off of the usual competitive crossgrade price, and 50% off of the normal subscription price of $199, and said that an offer for a special offer for a competitive crossgrade to a Sibelius perpetual license will be available “soon”.
August 31, 2024 at 10:10 am: Finale v27 is now available to customers with a previous version of Finale that purchase the special Dorico Pro crossgrade from MakeMusic.
August 31, 2024 at 9:13 am: Scoring Notes podcast episode added.
August 27, 2024 at 5:59 pm: Additional statement from MakeMusic regarding authorization and Finale v27.
“We’ve heard your concerns. They are valid. We originally announced that it would no longer be possible to reauthorize Finale after August 26th, 2025. But as a result of our community’s feedback, Finale authorization will remain available for the foreseeable future: Please note that future OS changes can still impact your ability to use Finale on new devices.”
“Finale v27 to be included with Dorico Pro Crossgrades: We are currently working on a solution for all customers who have purchased or intend to purchase a Dorico Pro crossgrade to be able to download Finale v27. This will ensure that you can export your Finale files using MusicXML 4.0, the most robust version of MusicXML available. Thank you for your patience, we will provide more information soon.”
“We hope these updates will help make your transition to Dorico even easier. We will continue to provide updates about the Finale sunset as more information becomes available.”
August 27, 2024 at 10:53 am: Additional statement from MakeMusic regarding downloads and authorization (via email to customers).
“Finale development has ended, but you can still download your previously purchased Finale versions from your eStore account. If your computer crashes or you need to install Finale on a new device, you’re not left without options.”
“We are committed to keeping the authorization process functional for a year. We’ve heard your concerns and are actively exploring ways to extend flexibility in the weeks ahead.”
August 26, 2024 at 8:42 pm: Q & A with Jason Wick, MakeMusic’s director of product development.
Q: How long will the partnership and special crossgrade offer with Dorico last for Finale users?
A: “We’ve partnered with Steinberg on this special crossgrade offer for a limited time. Without getting too specific about the terms of our agreement, I can tell you that people have time to check out Dorico and its 60-day free trial if they like.”
Q: What happens to Finale eventually? Will it go open source?
A: “It’s unlikely. I want to make sure people understand that Steinberg didn’t buy Finale; we have a partnership between our companies to try and give existing Finale users the best path forward for the long-term. When this specific partnership ends, Finale is still an asset that MakeMusic owns, and like any asset there are options around what you could do with it. At the moment, our focus is on our user base and working with Steinberg to facilitate migration and onboarding.”
Q: Will there be any improvements for batch conversion of files to get .mus files into Dorico?
“At this moment, the best I can offer is using the MusicXML folder export from Finale to import them into Dorico. MusicXML is designed for interchange, and a lot of layout decisions are handled by the programs themselves. Steinberg will collect tips and tricks and publish them on the Dorico blog in the coming days, so that should help some.”
Q: With the Finale decision, what happens with the Garritan instruments?
A: “Most Finale users know that Garritan sounds come with their installation, but these sounds are also part of MakeMusic Cloud (formerly SmartMusic). We update these libraries periodically and will continue to sell them from the MakeMusic eStore. Garritan libraries with an ARIA Player also work with Dorico.”
August 26, 2024 at 9:24 am: Initial publication.
Bill
I guess it should come as no surprise. They haven’t really done any development for years. But it’s still a sad day. I bought Finale 2.2 in the early nineties, and used it for many years. Farewell old friend!
David Toub
Well, that explains why tech support would punt on fixing or addressing any longstanding bugs.
This is hugely disappointing, but not at all surprising. Hopefully any future macOS updates won’t break it for at least some time (Finale has been pretty stable though the last few major macOS versions), but I am hugely pissed that I may have to actually learn another notation program, and also fork over more $ unless I can manage with something like Musescore. I’m not up for learning a new application and unlearning how I have been notating with Finale for decades.
Really crappy way to start my Monday. Also if Finale will not be able to be authorized after next year, that is essentially saying one will not be able to even access one’s Finale files after next year. That is pretty shabby-MakeMusic should really consider unlocking Finale at some point. If I can’t transfer Finale to a new computer and run it, when I own the software, then that is shabby.
Jon Griffin
I agree as a version 1.0 user. Fortunately for me, I really don’t need a lot of what Finale could do and MuseScore is where I’m heading. Big band charts and lead sheets don’t need the Dorico complexity either.
David Toub
Understood. For me, it’s also about workflow. I only compose a few works/year at this point, but once I eventually retire that would change for the positive. I’ve gotten pretty used to the quirks of Finale, and having to use a lot of various plugins, but those are often very powerful (not sure there is anything akin to the JW Rhythm Copy plugin in Dorico, etc). I can use Noteperformer in Dorico, which I guess is fine, but I’m so used to how Finale does things that I worry Dorico will get in my way. On the positive side, even the work I started last week is exposing lots of odd bugs/quirks in Finale that has cost me effort and time, so if Dorico avoids that, great. I’ve downloaded the trial version to kick the tires and see if it’s usable for me. If not, then I’ll have to get by with something like Musescore, but it will not do for me what Finale has done for many many decades, warts and all.
Ben Byram-Wigfield
Very sad news. First released the same year as Photoshop and Quark XPress.
Nothing said about Garritan instruments, though. ?
David Toub
GPO5 has been, in my opinion, dead for years. No updates, no nothing. I moved on to NotePerformer, although some things are still a bit better with GPO5 (strings, in some cases), and for some recordings I’ve blended the two.
Philip Rothman
I’ve just updated the article with comments from MakeMusic’s Jason Wick. With respect to Garritan: “Most Finale users know that Garritan sounds come with their installation, but these sounds are also part of MakeMusic Cloud (formerly SmartMusic). We update these libraries periodically and will continue to sell them from the MakeMusic eStore. Garritan libraries with an ARIA Player also work with Dorico.”
Craig
Definitely a sad day. I’ve been using Finale since version 1.
Jon Griffin
I started with Finale 1.0 for Windows. I am one who has 30 years worth of stuff. I hated Dorico when I tried it a few years ago, so I likely won’t be switching. I also don’t need all the power. I guess it’s time to dig in to MuseScore which I have dabbled with, but since I know Finale so well, never got in deep.
I’m trying, along with other creatives I know, to eliminate as many subscriptions, proprietary software and the like (think Adobe as well). This is just a push in that direction. I really suspected that MakeMusic would go the subscription route, but TBH, this is better since it forces
David Toub
I did ask MM support if they might consider unlocking Finale when it is finally dead. Why not? They could even open-source it, but just unlocking it would be a useful step since, barring macOS incompatibilities, one could at least continue to use it even if one purchases a new Mac…
David Wood
As explained in the article, the quid pro quo of the Steinberg deal is likely to be that MakeMusic instantly stopped all further distribution of Finale other than downloads for existing licensees. Steinberg is paying to acquire Finale customers, both by giving a 50% discount on the crossgrade price of Dorico Pro and, quite likely, some sort of payment to MakeMusic. Exactly how any payment to MakeMusic is structured will be commercially confidential, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a one-off payment plus a further payment per customer who purchases a Dorico licence.
Now that the Steinberg deal has been signed, it is doubtful that MakeMusic can release the Finale source code even if it wanted to. In any event, open-sourcing existing software is often difficult, especially if the software relies on commercial libraries. It is also doubtful that there would be sufficient interest in maintaining a complex and mature codebase for a niche product such as a music notation program, especially when there is already a strong and actively developed open-source contender in MuseScore.
Realistically, what has been announced is the best that could be done once MakeMusic decided to end further development of Finale. There is a good deal for existing Finale customers to acquire a Dorico Pro licence if they wish; giving a sizeable discount on the only competitor product that uses perpetual licensing. MakeMusic gets to exit the notation business as gracefully as possible. Finale customers who do not want to switch to Dorico are free to migrate to MuseScore or, if they want to pay for a Sibelius subscription, to Sibelius. Of course, Finale customers can keep using Finale for as long as they have Finale activated on suitable hardware, though this will not be a sustainable choice in the long term.
Unfortunately, software products are discontinued, so it is sometimes necessary to go through the pain of switching to an alternative product that is actively maintained.
Jon Griffin
“There is a good deal for existing Finale customers to acquire a Dorico Pro licence if they wish; giving a sizeable discount on the only competitor product that uses perpetual licensing.”
Don’t worry, I have no doubt they will also go the subscription route. I may be wrong, but…
Justin Tokke
Sibelius still offers perpetual licenses.
David Wood
So they do – I readily concede that my earlier post was in error in that regard. Avid’s policy seems to keep changing; the last time I looked, they heavily pushed subscriptions. As of now, you can buy Sibelius Ultimate as a perpetual licence, so long as you click a fairly small link on the purchase page to switch to perpetual licences.
Giovanni
OMG …!!!
Finale user from the beginig. Ok I understand the situation but what will happen with my archive of thousand of scores?
For the future I will need a PC, that I will not update, only for open and manage the Finale files?
Suggestions?
I really hope that Make Music will authorize Finale 27 in newest PC…
Itzhak yaron
Said I knew that all along that’s why I chose Sibelius now I’m afraid Sibelius also is a sinking sheep, but I see how they develop on regular basis so I don’t know but younger composers use Dorico
Itzhak Yaron
Sad I knew that all along that’s why I chose Sibelius now I’m afraid Sibelius also is a sinking ship,
I see how they develop on regular basis so I don’t know. younger composers use Dorico
REPLY
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
I’ve been using Finale since 1993 because it was (and to a large extent, still is) capable of advanced notation, graphical scores, and arbitrary placement and other features. I have a long list of clients for whom programs like Sibelius, Musescore, Graphire, etc., simply couldn’t do the work. Dorico? I don’t know. From what I’ve read, it’s even more entrenched in traditional 19th-century notational approaches.
I might be able to develop scores in Dorico, but we definitely need a “soft landing” conversion app that will accurately replicate all features of Finale scores (layout, graphical content, special characters, etc.).
Basically, I’m lost.
Lance Montgomery
I’d love to hear from Dorico users about their perspective on this, and the capability of Dorico with extended technique, graphical content, etc.
I’m a Sibelius user and there are plenty of frustrations, but somewhat-arbitrary placement is possible (still needs to be attached to a staff somewhere).
Robert Ostermeyer
Dorico’s statement that they have paved the way from Finale to Dorico is cheeky. It’s not just about the money, but about exporting to Dorico, which is neither easy nor error-free.
Another problem with the end of Finale – the shutdown of the license servers. If things go well, I personally and my music publisher, where I have been working with Finale since 1999, could be faced with hundreds of dead files.
Lance Montgomery
I hope Avid sees this and makes some serious, sorely–needed changes to stay in the market.
As a Sibelius user of 20+ years, I refer everyone new in the industry to choose Dorico. I try about twice a year to jump into Dorico and I just can’t beat my muscle memory. Can’t spend weeks+ learning while having contract work. But Dorico is so forward thinking and has some game-changing features I have needed from Sibelius. I’ve reached out to Avid over the years with zero success in, for example, getting a legitimate playback engine, overhauling it and getting rid of the ancient and PAINSTAKING sound sets nightmare.
Scorers who will need to use samples for the final product NEED to be able to compose FOR the samples they’ll use. Totally different than composing for real performers. People have strengths and weaknesses that frequently don’t overlap with samples. Can’t tell you how many times I compose a line, then get into production and can’t find a single sampled horn or violin that can do what a real performer can in a lifelike way. So I have to re-compose. But MORE nightmarish is setting up a sound set ensemble in Sibelius. Meanwhile, Dorico is absolutely crushing it in that department. (No, using Noteperformer 4 with the paired library is not the same as using the real patches.)
Though being a Sibelius user, this is still devastating news. Finale has been a great competitor and co-innovator, and the thought of Avid leaving me behind is scary. Although, I guess Avid has left us behind for years.
Lance Montgomery
MakeMusic should really release the source code and let others maintain it. That would be a hero move.
Michele Sharik
As a handbell composer/arranger, my main concerns re Dorico are whether it includes (or plans to include very soon) handbell-specific articulations, and the Handbells Used Chart plug-in.
G-Reg
Been with Finale since version 1. It is kind of sad, but I have been continually frustrated with the Mac versions for YEARS. I haven’t upgraded since V.25 because I inevitably end up getting nothing I really want or need in the updates. Been using the Logic Pro scoring features and MuseScore and get everything I need and most of what I want.
If anyone has news on the Garritan instruments please chime in. I use the Garritan ‘Ultimate Collection’ (GPO4, GIO, JABB, World Instruments, Pipe Organs) and GPO5 extensively! I also use them with Plogue Sforzando as well as the Aria Player. I sure hope that these VIs continue to be updated and supported!
Bernie Anderson
Having copied many a show over the decades on Finale (using it since 1996), I’ve very curious as to where the professional copy houses (especially on Broadway) will go. Finale has been THE software as far back as the first computer copied show. Knowing where they go will lead me to the next option. In the meantime, I’ll muddle through learning Dorico, but I hope somehow the Finale code will become open source and available at least for archiving purposes. I don’t think people realize how bad this is and how deep it actually goes. This is Pro Software used in the industry and not just another app that’s being discontinued. This is the same as if Avid said, Pro Tools is dead, but you can move to Ableton, no problem.
Daniel Spreadbury
Bernie, I’d love to talk to you about Dorico and musical theatre. The current West End revival of “Hello Dolly!” has been prepared entirely in Dorico, and it’s been going well for the team there. This is an area of music prep that we are keen to expand into, and I definitely want to cultivate more contacts in the Broadway world. It’s been several years since I was in New York myself in a room of Broadway copyists when Dorico was less mature than it is today, but I really think it has pretty much every tool that’s needed to make a successful set of performance materials for a show, and to roll with the punches as it goes through revisions.
Bob Prowse
Hello – just curious/nosey… did you establish contact with Daniel Spreadbury, as he indicated in his reply he’d like to do.?
It has struck me, reading posts on various forums with folks’ concerns in this difficult time, Musical Theatre related Finale show scores deserves wider, specific attention. Maybe a dedicated thread/topic on the Dorico forum pages…
David Toub
@Lance: I’ve made the same suggestion, and directly to MakeMusic. Stay tuned, but I’m not optimistic. It is ridiculous that one will not be able to transfer a program that one has purchased to a new computer after next August.
@G-Reg: re Garritan, I have GPO5. It’s been essentially dead for a few years now-no updates or anything. I do sometimes prefer it to NotePerformer, or run it alongside NP when its samples are better for some sections of a work of mine. But it’s not really been a focus of MakeMusic for quite some time, and apparently is not able to be downloaded now, either, for new purchasers.
Been playing with Dorico but not sure it’s going to work for me. Hopefully I can just keep Finale 27.4 going with my current setup for several years and then worry about it. Conversion to MusicXML works but importing it into Dorico is not flawless by any means, so if I have to tweak an old score (and I have scores that started out with Finale 3.2 in the early 90’s) I will be screwed. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem too likely-I’ve managed to get most of my older scores in better shape recently and also with better audio files.
But this is still a major issue and MM could have done all of us longtime, loyal users a solid by not turning off their registration servers in a year. I mean, people have to maintain tax records for at least seven years. I had to keep patient records in my old gyn practice for many years. Yet MM will make Finale unusable for someone who recently purchased Finale and ends up needing to purchase and use a new computer in late 2025. That’s just not right.
Jon Griffin
I’m writing a post (ongoing maybe) about my personal use case and moving to Muse. So far, I can say that if you have old musicxml (pre 4.0), there will be many issues. If you export in 4.0 you will have little to no issues. I am going to try to use the convert directories option to reconvert some musicxml that is older.
Also, make sure you select 4.0 in the musicxml options. Not sure what it defaults to.
This isn’t a promo, there is no post yet, but I will probably put something up tomorrow when my step mother is back home and I have some time to myself :)
https://jongriffinmusic.com is where the info will be.
BTW – to the admins, I am not getting notifications even though I’m subscribed to them on this thread.
David Toub
yes, no notifications on my end either.
Philip Rothman
Sorry about this and thanks for letting me know. I have been down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to sort out why the comment reply notification isn’t working and am unable to do at the moment. I’ll revisit it again later.
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
Sorry to hear about your stress. FYI, when I tried to sub to replies, I was sent a code. It didn’t work, so I asked for another one. Seven tries, no joy.
Philip Rothman
I found the setting. You should now see a “Notify me of follow-up comments by email.” I’m afraid this will only work once you submit a new comment and won’t be retroactive. The “Notify me of new posts by email.” checkbox is to subscribe to new blog posts.
Jon Griffin
One of the issues I have come across with MuseScore is that they have no real support for repeat endings with a tied note (reverse ties in Finale) on the 2nd or more ending. There are hacks, but if you rely on playback (which I don’t), then it is a pain. This is something that even in the 90’s Encore supported. Rather strange since this isn’t a fringe notation device.
Isaac Weiss
All proprietary software does this sooner or later. Dorico will, too. Maybe not as draconian with the timeline (unless they also cut a deal to goose sales of a competing product), but at some point there will be a version that is the last, and at some point that last version will no longer be available, and at some point that last version will no longer work, and all your decades of Dorico files will be permanently unopenable. This is why many government agencies are mandated to store data in open source formats.
If you’re having to convert everything to MusicXML and switch to another program, save yourself from being burned again. https://musescore.org/en/node/366024
Patrick Rice
I’ve use Finale since ’99. I’ve written my own plugins with the first PDK in 2000. These plugins are for specialized notation of Renaissance choral music in mensural notation. I recreate early part books. Does Dorico have the ability to customize the product in this way? Looks like I may have to keep a windows 10 computer limping along for another decade or so.
ARGH!
Ben Byram-Wigfield
I’ve created these recreations of Palestrina partbooks entirely in Dorico. https://www.ancientgroove.co.uk/freebies/Palestrina_Dorico.pdf
I haven’t done any ligatures, which would definitely be a challenge, but it’s pretty capable as is.
Jesús Gomez
Ben, what music font did you use for this? It looks amazing!
Ben Byram-Wigfield
It’s actually something I’ve created; but Bravura has most Renaissance and Medieval symbols, as part of the SMuFL standard.
Richard Simm
Just gorgeous.
Jon Arnold
Ben, this is awesome to see as I consider Dorico more. Do you have a video or tutorial about this? Did you enter the pitches and rhythms semantically and change the font, or is it manually positioned symbols?
Ben Byram-Wigfield
Yes, it’s all real notes and rests. It’s mostly open metre, though there are some sneaky hidden barlines.
I do have a custom font; but you could change the glyphs for some of the Med/Ren glyphs in Bravura, using the Music Symbols editor. Notehead Sets allow stem positioning in the middle.
The only “cheating” is that I used Jazz Scoops for custodes (just so they would attach to a note and take horizontal space); and each part is a separate Flow, rather than concurrent staves. It’s possible that’s not necessary.
There are Note Spacing Changes around the rests, but there’s surprisingly little manual adjustment.
Jon Arnold
That’s awesome. It would be great to see some resources about this, but hopefully I can dig into it someday.
Ernie Mansfield
TO all Finale Users: I feel your pain! I spent years using music software that went out of business. Most notable was Graphire Music Press (GMP) which, up until around 2010, did everything I needed, and kept me very employed in the niche market I was in. However, the good news: GMP still continues to function on Windows computers to this day, even though development stopped around 20 years ago. (The Mac version did not fare so well; GMP was never re-written for OSX. But there is an app that will still run OS9 on a MacOS machine, so files can still be opened and edited.) So, Finale users, don’t lose all hope! GMP files are still able to be opened and edited, even with a “tiny” user base; so with a much larger user base, and with the support of .XML and Dorico development, the transition from Finale to Dorico will likely be much smoother than you can imagine right now.
Katie Argyle
Excellent article Philip. I’ll be sharing it around. Tough news for many.
Philip Rothman
Thanks, Katie!
Robrecht Paternoster
I have been using Finale from about the first Windows release, until version 24. Then I stumbled on Dorico 2.x, and after 6 months of trying and hesitation, I made the definitive jump. There were three main reasons:
1. I saw that, in fact, real development efforts on Finale were slagging (version 25 did not contain any useful enhancement for me).
2. Dorico 2 offered features and easiness of work that were not possible in Finale 24.
3. The Dorico Forum community was very welcoming and helpful (and still is today)
After using Dorico for 5 years, there are two extra reasons now:
4. I have experienced several times that, when reporting a technical issue to the Dorico development team, they corrected the bug in the next free update (which is about every 2-3 months). Two years ago, it was done within 24 hours (!), last month they managed to correct a reported bug within three weeks in the update that has been released lately .
I have never seen such interaction at Finale, alas.
5. The progress on audio rendering has been spectacular since version 4.5. In our company, we have now several people who are using Dorico as their DAW engine for rendering works such as Ravel’s Boléro, a Beethoven piano concerto, arias from La Traviata, etc., with a quality and realism rivalling live studio recordings. The fact that you can use all VST’s from the leading manufacturers helps of course.
For current Finale users: yes, I do understand your sorrow, disappointment and worries. But there is not much choice. And as Dorico 2 was already much better than Finale 24, and that Finale 27 and 24 are not really far apart from each other (as far as I can judge it), Dorico Pro 5 is way better now. Yes, you will need to learn the new philosophy (there are excellent tutorial videos, and the documentation is absolutely exemplary), and there is certainly a serious learning curve. But I can only recommend it (and I have no shares in Steinberg or Yamaha :) ). (By the way, I did install the new MuseScore last year, and we follow up the updates, and the conclusion is (still) that we can’t use it for serious publishing work.)
One final advice, if I may: I export my historical Finale work in XML format, to import it into Dorico. The export / import is not flawless (Finale does make errors, and Dorico does not support all XML features). I would guess that between 5 and 10% of work has to be done again (correcting a few notes, slurs, dynamic markings, ornaments etc.), but then features like advanced condensing and instrument part generation are far better in Dorico, and that saves time. I will not be counting on unlocking my Finale license, so, I’ll make sure that all my XML exports of historical Finale work are done by next year.
Alessandro Melchiorre
On the Steinberg site the Dorico Pro is offered at 579$ VAT included…
if I accept the Dorico Finale crossgrade the Vat has to be added, why?
no more 149$ but 181,78!
Anto
The announcement said 149 $ but you have to pay taxes = 180 total.. ?not fair . ..
Alessandro Melchiorre
somebody will join me for an action against this hidden price tax?
MaRo
As far as the crossgrade goes: At least the German Sibelius distributor also has a crossgrade from Finale (or other commercial notation software). At the moment it’s 220€ (for a perpetual license). Maybe they’ll adapt this to attract switchers?
I wonder how many people are actually going to take up the Dorico offer. From my experience many professional engravers have all the commercial software anyway. I also suspect that many Finale users are “holdovers” from earlier versions. How many people would have taken up Finale as their first and primary notation software in the last few years?
I’ve been using Finale since about 1992 and Sibelius since about 2010 or so; I’ve also done some projects in Musescore. After it became impossible to re-activate Sibelius 6 I tried switching to Dorico. Two projects later I did the crossgrade to a new Sibelius version. Dorico clearly wasn’t for me.
Jon Burr
Thank you for this amazingly comprehensive and thorough analysis of the entire situation, Philip !
For me it’s been a challenge, and is a challenge, to get into Dorico while still continuing to deliver projects for my customers… now it’s going to be about time management !
The Batch Export to XML utility in Menus>Plugins> Finale Script>Batch>Batch Export to XML is going to come in handy.
I plan to search all .musx files with Spotlight (Mac), drag the results over to a folder on an external drive, then run the script. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow, though ! There is a transition period.
Today’s letter from MakeMusic that they “hear” us and will be continuing to work toward a smoother transition is somewhat encouraging.
Philip Rothman
Thanks, Jon!
hymnotic
I just did an XML import from one of my Finale files into both Dorico and MuseScore – and MuseScore was infinitely better, maintaining note and staff spacing, hidden staves, and quite a few other things. Cost $0. Optimized staves were the main issue. Dorico? It got the notes and parts in – but no more. It will be a project and it’s looking like a good thing I didn’t give away my previous mac mini. I hope that $149 and their ownership of the source code will get an import tool, otherwise it is a lot of money just to have to reformat every measure of a previously perfect score – and in Finale, it was perfect.
Jon Griffin
Just make sure you export to MusicXML 4. Otherwise, you will get some very weird results.
Yes, I had to remove optimizations, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.
I have no reason to “upgrade” to Dorico. At least for my use cases.
Bob Prowse
Hi – It’s been stated elsewhere by both Steinberg and MM staff, Steinberg did not get any ownership/access of Finale source code in this new ‘partnership’. Also, as another user said above, use of MusicXML v4 is important for more successful data (file) exchange in this situation.
hymnotic
Hi Bob, yes, I read that in the update to this post. Will carry on. I bent Finale to my will… I will learn to do it with Dorico, though my Muse test case is further ahead at the moment. Dorico is no less complex than Finale, but is significantly better organized.
Steve Fiskum
I have a lot of comments after my 30+ year career using Finale, specifically for the publishing industry. I’m shocked but not surprised. I now understand and feel for all of the amazing SCORE engravers and their GUI transition, appreciating their work that helped us progress. I’m sure it felt similar. It will be interesting and exciting to see what’s to come out of real competition – we’ve been stuck.
Frank Perri
To put it as gently as possible, last time I tried Dorico, it simply wasn’t up to the professional standard of output that I require. I work professional and regularly do scores for recording sessions for Broadcast television, big band work for bands like the Ellington Orchestra, etc. I started out in the late 80s as an engraver so I have a very particular vision for how a score should look.
Finale was the only program to give you the level of control and flexibility to allow me to tweak my house style to what it currently is. Often people ask me what I use because they love how my charts look and they often look a little let down when I tell them Finale because most seem to use either Sibelius or Dorico and wondered why their stuff didn’t look as good.
I haven’t tried Dorico recently but I’m not optimistic that it is capable of anywhere near the same level of control to give me what I need. Honestly it’s not really part of the Dorico creed, which is really to try to do as much for the user as possible so the user doesn’t have to think too hard about the layout so there’s no impetus to give the user that level of control. That level of control is what drove many to think Finale was too complicated to learn. But that level of control is what I need.
I’m going to demo Dorico again but I have a strong feeling I’m going to have to stick with Finale and just keep my fingers crossed. I’m on a PC so I have a better chance than a Mac user of my OS not killing my Finale install and as long as I can keep the hardware running and not have to reinstall it, I should be OK for the immediate future.
Not to mention at what point with constant deadlines do I even have time to learn a new program and become proficient enough in it to get done what I need to get done when I have a deadline bearing down on me? As it is, I just got contacted today for a television show on ESPN that needs orchestrations for strings and winds. Do I try to do it in Dorico knowing it’s going to take me 10x as long because I don’t know how to use it, with a deadline bearing down on me? Or do I do it in Finale, which I know like the back of my hand, can produce orchestrations to the quality I need, and super fast, but yet produce more musx files that I might not be able to access in the near future?
I don’t need new features, I don’t need bug fixes – I already know a gazillion workarounds – I just need Makemusic to keep Finale running.
Daniel Spreadbury
Frank, I completely understand your concern that Dorico’s desire to do things automatically for the user is at odds with Finale’s flexibility. However, we have always said that Dorico’s approach is to do things automatically *that you would do anyway*, and for everything else to provide global options to change automatic behaviour, individual overrides via the Properties panel at the individual level, and finally the ability to make non-semantic graphical tweaks on each item in Engrave mode. We think this provides a powerful way to express your intention to the software, so that you spend less time making the same kinds of adjustments over and over again.
I’d be very happy to discuss your specific needs. Please feel free to come and find me over on the Dorico forum, or to drop me an email at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de.
Frank Perri
Like I did admit, I haven’t demoed Dorico for some time so it’s possible things are different but I will give it a fair shake and see where I feel it isn’t working for me and I’m more than willing to come share my concerns and reach out to you. I appreciate your willingness to reach out.
David Murray
I am a former SCORE engraver who uses Dorico and Sibelius. Dorico is a terrific app and certainly has some very excellent features (ie. score condensing). However, it does not do everything (ie. cannot cue pitched instruments into a non pitched instrument staff), If you edit or compose orchestra/band music, this is a problem. Also the “my way or the highway” (my term) approach does not appeal to many of the publisher editors I have spoken with. FINALE has been inferior software for many years, it is time for it to be retired forever. Sibelius for me is still the best option for more flexibility. With over 1000 Subito Music of publications edited in Sibelius over the past 26 years, I recommend composers consider the less steep learning curve of Sibelius over Dorico.
Alessandro Melchiorre
but no crossgrade…!?
Philip Benjamin
Island – not Industry
A brilliant move by Steinberg and MakeMusic – ensuring that the customers still using Finale – who on the Finale forum ask questions like:
“Why can I not import my Finale 2 score into version 18? I want my money back for my version 18 purchase – and my Finale 2 purchase”
will in the next ten years instead be posting questions on the Dorico forum:
“If I update to Dorico 5.2.3.6 will my Finale medieval hairpins be imported? What? You’re kidding? I would never have paid for Dorico 5 if I had known this”.
Steinberg must believe that the time spent helping such customers will cost less than the $150 they will be required to pay (I say $150 – not more – since if these customers didn’t look past Finale – they will never upgrade their Dorico version).
The brilliant move? These two companies – knowing that this was the typical Finale hold out customer (other than those required to use the app for industry reasons) devised a way that these customers would be FORCED to spend money – be FORCED to change. Well not exactly – not forced to spend money – forced to decide whether they wished to skip using a computer for music notation for the rest of their life – or spend money.
I don’t see how anyone can question the approach taken – when one considers the customers that are involved. These customers must be an absolute NIGHTMARE to support. Both companies should get four times the money they will actually get for having either held – or acquired – these people.
My regret is only that the place that ANY of us can move to is to is another desert island. The island we are on called Dorico has some truly amazing facilities – it is the venue for some truly innovative work related to both notation and notation related playback – but it is still a desert island – since only an app which is both a DAW and notation app will encourage young people to join a culture of music making where every note and rest is a conscious choice – instead of laying what are – and will be – AI tracks.
I note that Daniel Spreadbury is attempting to engage here with a Broadway linked person. Does he recognise that Broadway – having used Finale for thirty years – long past its suitability – now needs to move to a single DAW notation app – so that the score and also individual audio rehearsal parts – and any track and automation – are edited in a single operation? Does he recognise that the same is true of Hollywood – does he recognise that these groups still don’t have an app they can use which is structured around their needs? (And others whose needs/hopes are the same or similar to these people).
This move has demonstrated that the entire music notation market – instead of being an industry – is an island. Steinberg have no reason to regret that – unless they make decisions dedicated to the welfare of users ahead of decisions related to profit. To have an industry what we need is two or more all in one apps (perhaps more because the music notation isn’t the only element in the app that must earn the sale). The Dorico team have admitted as much in spending a huge amount of their time on playback instead of notation in the last couple of releases.
Is it a crime to be like London or New York – to want both the best of the past – and the best of the present? It feels like it is – since a LOT of people have been waiting to use such an app for decades.
Alessandro Melchiorre
Logic?
Lewis Buckley
I used Finale from version 1.0 ($1,000 and simply didn’t work); then switched to Sibelius 1.0 when it came out because Finale support became disappointing; loved Sibelius until they outsourced the coding; switched to Dorico 1.0 and have enjoyed a level of company support and responsiveness that neither AVID nor MakeMusic ever approached. And the software is superb, and it was MUCH faster to learn.
The first project I did in Dorico was scoring a concert band arrangement of a score for a silent movie film. Multiple scenes with movements for each. Took about two weeks to learn the software, score the scenes, and put it into rehearsal.. And I’ve never looked back. (V.1 didn’t even have 1st/2nd endings yet — had to hand-write them — but the point is, it worked right out of the box and, again, offered unprecedented company support.)
I’m quick to point out that I work exclusively in traditional notation — no contemporary notation — but I do varying fonts (jazz, etc.), and I can produce harp parts, keyboard, lyrics, etc. beautifully and easily.
And to be clear about the required quality level, I used all three for publishing level output, as the former co-owner of Cimarron Music Press, a primarily wind music publisher.
Dorico’s learning curve was by far the shortest of the three, and as I mentioned before, Steinberg’s support was by far the best in the bend-over-backwards/to-provide-help department. The name Daniel Spreadbury will become that of your new best friend.
I’m not pretending to minimize the impact of this situation on the lives of people whose lifetimes of output are in Finale; I really can only imagine it, and I’m
But given that there is no good answer for all of you who are in that position, Dorico is at least a good answer for most of you, and it’ll have a much shorter learning curve than either of the other two did, as long as you shed the natural desire for it to work in the same way Finale does.
Good luck out there!
Lee W
I do have Dorico 5 and I have been on it for over 2 years (from Finale), but I am interested in seeing what Avid cooked up for the Perpetual License offering.
I kinda prefer Sibelius’ UI and Workflow to Dorico’s. I just don’t want to pay another $600 – especially when I’m going to have to do another data migration.
Finale going away was not surprising. I knew this was going to happen, which is why I jumped ship. I’m surprised it didn’t happen a decade ago. I think it only survived the past decade due to the publishing industry.
Jon Burr
Avid has added Perpetual @ $149 to their crossgrade offering.
Peter Vadala
Nothing beats finale and everybody knows it; this is an evil anti-competitive move. Here’s how the community can support each other:
Bill, I want to develop a VM machine so all of us can continue to have a permanent virtualized environment for us license-holders to run our software in perpetuity as we are entitled to, as the evil holding company Peakware made a deal with the devil to sell out the greatest software – and it still is – in music engraving/ transcription, with the added benefits of great synthesizers, publishing, graphic exports, and production capabilities.
Please let me know if anyone else would be interested in pooling cash to pay an independent systems expert to implement a Forever-FInale solution. it’s too good to let rot, and we made an investment in it worth protecting.
Also, please complain to the SEC about this monopolistic anti-competitive behavior by PeakMusic’s MakeMusic and Yamaha’s Steinberg-Dorico.
Jon Griffin
The SEC doesn’t care at all about these tiny companies. Don’t fool yourself.