Nearly two years after MakeMusic ended development of Finale and endorsed a crossgrade path to Dorico Pro, MakeMusic is stepping back from selling that crossgrade itself. The company is notifying Finale customers today that, effective July 23, 2026, it will stop offering the discounted Dorico Pro crossgrade for $149 through the MakeMusic online store — Steinberg will honor the same price directly going forward. There’s an important detail that may actually matter most for Finale users still sitting on an older version: the free copy of Finale v27 that’s come bundled with the crossgrade goes away with it.
As a reminder, official support for Finale ended on August 25, 2025, one year after the original announcement. That hasn’t changed.
Scoring Notes reached out to MakeMusic in advance of the announcement, and Conner Lewis, MakeMusic’s manager of go-to-market, shared the details the company is sending to customers today.
Here’s what’s changing, effective after July 23.
Last call for Finale v27
Since August 2024, Finale owners have been able to buy Dorico Pro at a steeply discounted price of $149, against a $580 list price — directly from the MakeMusic online store, after logging in and verifying ownership of Finale or Finale PrintMusic. Buyers who didn’t already have it also received a complimentary copy of Finale v27, added to the offer shortly after the original announcement.
After July 23, MakeMusic will no longer sell the crossgrade at all. Steinberg will pick it up, honoring the same discounted price directly — so the deal itself, dollar for dollar, isn’t disappearing. But Steinberg’s version of the offer won’t include Finale v27. If you’re still on an older version of Finale and want to get your hands on v27 — useful for its SMuFL support and MusicXML 4.0 export before you make the jump to another program — the only way to get it for free is to buy the crossgrade from the Finale eStore before July 23. After that, there’s no indication that path will still exist.
If you’ve been sitting on the fence about picking up that last version of Finale, this is the moment to stop sitting.
Finale authorization to continue indefinitely
Also included in today’s announcement is a reaffirmation on Finale authorization. When MakeMusic first announced Finale’s end of life, it initially said authorizations would stop working on new devices about a year out, then walked that back within a day to say authorization would remain active “for the foreseeable future.” We checked back in with MakeMusic in 2025 and got the same assurance.
Today MakeMusic reaffirmed that authorizations “will continue indefinitely.” You’ll still be able to log into your MakeMusic account, download your purchased Finale products, and authorize the software on new machines, with no expiration in sight.
There is a serious caveat if you’re still running Finale: MakeMusic has said that Finale is not fully compatible with current versions of macOS, “beginning with Sequoia.” The company’s advice is to think twice before updating the OS on any machine you rely on for Finale. In our own testing last summer, Finale 27.4.1 seemed to run just fine on Sequoia.
Regardless of anecdotal experience, this is MakeMusic’s official position, and if you’re weighing whether to update a Finale machine — to Sequoia, to Tahoe, or Golden Gate — that’s a real factor to put on the scale, on top of the general guidance we laid out in that article about isolating a dedicated Finale machine from OS updates altogether.
The bottom line
If you already have your Finale v27 and your Dorico Pro crossgrade sorted out, today’s changes won’t affect you much. If you don’t, the calendar just got a lot more urgent: you have until July 23 to buy the crossgrade from the MakeMusic online store if you want Finale v27 included for free with that purchase. After that, MakeMusic is out of the crossgrade-selling business entirely, and Steinberg takes over — at the same price, but without the Finale v27 sweetener.
Steinberg has an official landing page for Finale crossgraders, and presumably it will be updated after July 23 with information for former Finale customers seeking to purchase Dorico Pro directly from Steinberg.
And, as a reminder, Avid is actively courting Finale crossgraders with its own matching $149 offer for a perpetual license to Sibelius Ultimate. You can crossgrade to both Dorico Pro and Sibelius Ultimate if you wish; neither offer demands exclusivity from the customer.
As for how long Finale itself will keep running on your machine: that part, encouragingly, remains, provided you don’t get too adventurous with OS updates.
More background: our 2025 Finale miniseries
If you’re still navigating the post-Finale landscape, or just want a refresher, last summer we published a three-part series covering the practical details of the sunset period in depth:
- “Finale’s twilight zone: Ensuring a smooth ride into the sunset” — a recap of the original news, how to use your Finale license to obtain other software (or that last version of Finale), and what changed (and didn’t) around authorization and downloads.
- “Using Finale in the unsupported era” — strategies for keeping Finale running for as long as you need it: operating systems, hardware, plug-ins, fonts, and official resources.
- “Leaving Finale behind” — how to archive your Finale files as you transition away, including exporting to MusicXML and PDF, and some thoughts on where to land next among Dorico, Sibelius, MuseScore, and other alternatives.
Most complex software will not run well indefinitely, given OS updates. And to not ever update one’s computer to the latest OS is a bit much; kinda like someone I once knew who bought the original iPod and rented a Mac just to dump everything he had on it and didn’t think he’d ever need to resync it. Both are not practical ideas in the long run.
I switched to Dorico in early September, 2024 after the announcement of Finale’s end-of-life status (and it was not significantly updated in some time in terms of longstanding bugs). I’m running macOS Tahoe, and for the rare times I have to go back to an old Finale score of mine to tweak something, if it involves Smart Shapes or even expressions, a lot of things do not work correctly. Fortunately, most of my scores have very few dynamics and I haven’t used a crescendo/decresecendo in years, but my older scores are a different beast entirely. I suspect with future iterations of macOS, and Windows, Finale will mostly not be very usable, or certainly not without some significant compromises and workarounds. I’ve heard of some folks who are maintaining an older Mac running Sequoia, and that is a nice idea for as long as that Mac works. Since Macs no longer reliably startup from cloned hard drives, that probably isn’t the best idea in place of a dedicated older system. At least authorization is not an issue, for the foreseeable future (no company, of course, is forever).