Using Finale in the unsupported era

Software isn’t forever. These days, digital products are constantly patched, updated, and upgraded without many people giving it a second thought. As of this very moment, we’re using Chrome 138.0.7204.158 on macOS 15.5, and when the time comes to start rocking in our chairs and waxing nostalgic about the days of yore, there’s a sneaking suspicion we probably won’t spend too much time saying, “Remember 138.0.7204.158? Wow, that was something special!”

But there was such a time in earlier days when software felt, if not permanent, then at least significant enough to seem that it would be all that we needed for a good long while. Much has been written about, say, the halcyon days of Mac System 7 and Windows 95, or, closer to home, Sibelius 6 and Finale 2011. Even though the internet was up and running decades ago, at one time it was impractical and costly to download and install software updates constantly, if at all. Software was delivered on fixed media and only intermittently updated until the next major version came along.

Regardless of the timing or frequency of updates, there was a feeling that the software you used would be there for you in some form for as long as you needed it. Many people had that feeling about Finale; after all, it was first released in 1988, not long after the ubiquitous MIDI standard itself came into being, and had survived amidst many technological changes, market developments, and operating systems.

Because of its prevalence in the world of music notation and its market dominance for many years, it is forgivable to have assumed that Finale would exist indefinitely. If you’re here, you know that’s not to be. Finale development has permanently ended; v. 27.4.1 is the very last one. In about a month, the company that is responsible for it, MakeMusic, won’t support it anymore.

But what if you have used Finale for any sizeable chunk of time in its 35 years of existence, and wish to continue doing so, despite the appeal and enticement of newer, supported applications? That’s quite a large ship to change course, and it’s reasonable to want to gently steer it to safety instead of sinking it mid-sea.

This is the second in a series of several articles we’ll be publishing in short succession to help navigate those waters. Our first article recapped the news itself and addressed options for obtaining and switching to other software, like Dorico Pro, Sibelius Ultimate, Capella, or MuseScore Studio, as well as how to obtain that very last version of Finale if you don’t have it already. We also addressed what will happen after August 25, 2025 — the last day Finale will be officially supported — and how to authorize a licensed copy of Finale or obtain older versions of the software after that date.

Here, we’ll focus on actually using Finale for at least a while longer after August 25 when the last person at the MakeMusic support desk has turned off the lights and disconnected the support line. Of course, Finale doesn’t run in a vacuum. It relies on operating systems, hardware, and other software to run, not to mention all the ways to extend Finale’s capabilities through plug-ins, macro programs, and the community of users and resources that have devoted lots of energy and time to the product over the years. We’ll do our best to address what’s going on in each of those areas.

The operating system

Officially, Finale v. 27.4.1 is compatible on Macs as far back as 10.14 (Mojave) all the way up to macOS 14 (Sonoma) and on PCs on Windows 10 and Windows 11. (Apple itself only supports macOS 15 Sequoia, macOS 14 Sonoma, and macOS 13 Ventura, and Microsoft will discontinue support for Windows 10 on October, 14, 2025.)

Historically, Finale has survived Windows updates fairly well, and Windows 12 is unlikely to appear anytime soon, so PCs running Finale should be stable for a while. Mac OS updates have become more regular, though, and the next one, macOS Tahoe 26 (now named with year-based versions) is due to arrive this fall.

Fortunately, Apple’s current operating system, macOS 15 Sequoia, which was released only weeks after MakeMusic announced they were not going to make any more Finale updates, seemed to have caused no noticeable problems for Finale 27.4.1! Even though MakeMusic’s official position is that “any future compatibility issues that may arise between Finale and Sequoia will not be fixed, and Sequoia will not be officially recognized by MakeMusic as a supported operating system,” we feel confident in saying that a computer running macOS 15 Sequoia should be fine, and since MakeMusic support is going away anyway, whether or not you’re running a supported OS won’t matter anymore.

Still, OS updates are a ticking time bomb for Finale, and, like the 800-pound gorilla, users ignore them at their peril.

All that being said, we’re never forced to update our OS, and theoretically as long as a computer is running macOS 14 (or 15), or Windows 11, Finale should continue to operate without issues. But we all use our computers for other things. Other programs still get updated; there are security updates; new programs that we might want to get; compatibility with other products in the Apple ecosystem (iOS 26, iPadOS 26, etc.). Or maybe a computer just finally dies.

At some point, one or all of these things are going to compel us to update our OS. Finale might get lucky again with the next Mac and Windows updates, but with each passing year, the likelihood of Finale getting crushed by that particular hefty monkey increases exponentially. Already, there are anecdotal reports of problems running Finale on beta releases of macOS 26 Tahoe, and while it’s too soon to tell if those are due to unresolved bugs from Apple or actual OS changes, in the end, it’s moot.

If running Finale well into the future is really critical for you, we would recommend finding a way to keep a computer running the current Mac or PC operating system for as long as may be practical.

Hardware

Installing Finale on a dedicated computer with macOS 15 Sequoia or Windows 11 parked on it may be the most straightforward, if draconian, solution. You could go a step further and disconnect it from the internet completely, but that’s impractical for most people. If you don’t accept OS updates on that dedicated computer, that should suffice. This should allow you to run Finale for as long as the hardware holds out.

The sweet spot between practicality and surety of use may well be using two computers but setting them up to easily switch between them using the same display, keyboard, and mouse. Many products offer this functionality as standard; we like the Logitech MX series of keyboards and pointing devices, which generally allow you to connect up to three Mac or Windows computers to a single device.

You can find other recommendations for computers, accessories, displays, and internal storage right here on Scoring Notes, where we covered these products in connection with Amazon’s recent Prime Day sale. Some of the best discounts may be gone, but there’s often another sale around the corner!

Alternatively, a tech-savvy user could partition their internal hard drive and install Sequoia or Windows 11 on the partition (or on an external hard drive) to permanently freeze Finale on that partition.

Virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, VMWare Workstation, or Oracle VirtualBox are among the products that can not just partition a hard drive, but actually emulate a complete physical machine. This solution may work well enough for certain tasks like opening files, exporting them to other formats like MusicXML, and other basic tasks like saving to PDF, but it’s less certain how they’ll behave when communicating with other software like third-party plug-ins, or hardware interfaces like MIDI keyboards and audio consoles, especially since those are actually plugged into a real (not virtual) machine. Therefore, tasks like editing and playing back files may not be reliable in a virtual system.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to cover the countless methods and manners of partitioning drives and configuring real and virtual machines, but if this sounds like a solution that will suit your needs, we encourage you to research it further.

Software

If you don’t have the latest — and last — version of Finale, which is 27.4.1, it’s no longer possible to simply upgrade to it from an earlier version, like from Finale 2014.

However, you can still obtain Finale v. 27.4.1 if you purchase the Dorico Pro crossgrade directly from the MakeMusic online store, which we’ve covered in our previous article. Anyone doing so will receive a complimentary upgrade to Finale 27. The cost is $149, and there is currently a promotion where by using the coupon code DORICO15 at checkout will receive an additional 15% off.

If you don’t yet have the latest version of Finale but plan on using the product for a while longer, we highly recommend purchasing this crossgrade, even if you have no immediate intention of using Dorico Pro, so that you can get access to Finale v. 27.4.1. It is likely that Finale v27 will run on newer operating systems longer than older versions of Finale will, even when it’s no longer officially supported. Moreover, Finale v27 includes the latest version of MusicXML, which will make it easier to transfer the data in these files to other music notation software (stay tuned for our next article for more on that).

We have confirmed that you will have access to the the MakeMusic store and be able to download your registered products, even after August 25. If you go there and login to your account, in the My Software tab you’ll see your most recent registrations. There is also the Download Library, which is a vast repository of items such as the latest maintenance update for every version of Finale dating back to Finale 97, font pack installers, old documentation, and the Dolet MusicXML plug-ins for Finale and Sibelius.

Again, we’ve covered the details of this in our previous article, but if you’re setting up a real or virtual machine like we described earlier, it may be a good time to log on to your account and grab the installers for all of the products and updates you think you’ll want to have indefinitely, just in case.

Fonts

It’s fair to say that music notation software would be impossible to use without music fonts. (For some tangential listening, check out our interview on the podcast with Cleo Huggins, who designed Sonata, the very first music font — a great conversation!)

Essential to any modern notation software are its fonts, and Finale uses a lot of them. Prior to Finale 27, like other notation software programs at the time, Finale relied upon music fonts designed specifically for use in that application. With Finale 27 (and refined in subsequent updates) came support for Standard Music Font Layout, or SMuFL, the font specification initiated by Steinberg for use in Dorico and now developed by the W3C Music Notation Community Group.

Because SMuFL is an open standard, SMuFL fonts can be used in any application that supports the SMuFL specification. When MakeMusic decided to support SMuFL, they needed to redesign their music fonts to adhere to that spec. As a result, anyone running an installer for Finale 27 got new SMuFL fonts prepended with the “Finale” name based on the old music fonts, such as Finale Maestro (based on Maestro), Finale Engraver (based on Engraver), etc.

MakeMusic released all of their “Finale” SMuFL fonts (along with some complementary text fonts, see below) under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) agreement, which means that these fonts can be freely used, modified, and redistributed, subject to the terms of the agreement, so even if you don’t have Finale, you are allowed to legally obtain the fonts from someone who does.

Thankfully, MakeMusic has made all of its Finale fonts available for anyone to download, for free, independently of Finale itself. 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.

Even though a standard Finale installation should install all of these fonts, if for some reason those fonts have gone missing on your computer, or, if you have a document that uses these fonts outside of Finale (it has been known to happen), you can obtain these fonts directly from MakeMusic, install them on your computer, and ensure that your document appears as expected. This is especially helpful for former Finale customers transitioning to using another software.

Follow this link to the official MakeMusic page containing the installers for Mac and Windows. You can read more about this topic right here on Scoring Notes, including how to use these fonts in Dorico, if you like.

Plug-ins

Even a casual user of Finale will likely be aware that third-party plug-ins have been critical to making Finale efficient and powerful. Some have even had “lite” versions of some of their plug-ins bundled with Finale for many years.

We reached out to some of these developers to see what the future of their plug-ins might be, and asked all of them whether the plug-ins could suffer any compatibility issues related to future OS updates. The consensus was that, although it’s theoretically possible that an OS update could do something to a plug-in, it’s rather unlikely. Generally, if Finale survives an update, the plug-ins will most likely survive. Specifics are provided below.

TG Tools

TGTools is developed by Tobias Giesen. These days, Tobias is primarily occupied with Syncovery, the backup and file synchronization software that he develops and supports.

But for nearly 30 years, TGTools has been indispensable for many Finale power users. Those users will be happy to know that Tobias told us, “I still use Finale myself,” and advised the following regarding TGTools: “If Finale survives an OS update, so will TGTools. The TGTools web site will remain active indefinitely. Further TGTools updates will likely be rare but can still happen.”

Patterson Plug-ins

In the same category as TGTools, Robert Patterson’s Patterson Plug-in Collection for Finale and his Copyist’s Helper have been crucial to the Finale user seeking to maximize efficiency and output quality. For example, Patterson Beams (a lite version of which is bundled with Finale) gets Finale’s beaming much closer to traditional engraved music than anything Finale can achieve with its built-in options.

Robert agreed with Tobias regarding OS updates and plug-ins, saying that “Plug-ins could in theory be subject to some kind of future incompatibility that Finale isn’t, but I don’t think it is likely.”

He also told us, “I’m not planning any further updates to either my plug-ins or RGP Lua. I have no plans to take down either website. My plug-ins run on my personal website and the Finale Lua site is now on Amazon Web Services at an extremely low cost.”

RGP Lua is an environment which Robert developed to run scripts written in the Lua programming language as plugins in Finale. It derives its usefulness and power from the incredible scripts that individual programmers have contributed to the community. The RGP Lua script repository is still active, and although there haven’t been many new scripts written since the announcement last year, this is one area that could potentially still expand. He agreed, saying, “There is nothing stopping Lua programmers from continuing to write Lua programs for Finale.”

Robert also alerted us to a plug-in that he contributes to called Finale Hacks, which “fixes a couple of known macOS incompatibilities. One goal is to add to that as we discover further issues. This could keep Finale going on later macOS versions longer,” he said.

Perfect Layout

Perfect Layout, from Jan Angermüller’s Elbsound Studio, is a plug-in that includes more than 100 automated layout processes for Finale, such as collision removal of most music symbols, automatic alignment of expressions, articulations, hairpins, lyrics and many smart shapes, and automatic visual balancing and collision removal of staves and systems in score and extracted parts.

As with Tobias and Robert, Jan told us that he did not think that it was likely that an OS update on its own would create problems for a Finale plug-in.

Regarding Perfect Layout, Jan said that he intends to keep the product available for “as long as it remains commercially viable.” He told us, “I intend to continue using Finale for my own work for the foreseeable future. I’ve been a Finale user since the early 1990s (starting with version 2.7) and maintain a large library of scores, many of which are frequently revised or re-arranged. Migrating these to a different notation program would require substantial effort, including reformatting and extensive proofreading. Because I rely on Perfect Layout for my own arranging needs, it’s very likely that updates related to the activation server and operating system compatibility will continue to be provided for a long time.”

Jan also plans to make further updates to Perfect Layout. “Development is actively ongoing, and Perfect Layout 4.0 is currently in preparation,” he told us. “The most recent update of the version 3 series (v3.0225) was released in October 2024 and is expected to be the final version within the v3 line. However, if you check the version history, you’ll already find about 100 new features and enhancements listed under the provisional tag v3.0227 — these are likely to be released with version 4.0.”

He also pointed us to a video he made that showcased Perfect Layout running on an Apple M4 Pro processor with Finale 27 on macOS Sequoia, “along with a quick demonstration of what Perfect Layout can do in real-world notation scenarios,” he said.

JW Tools

Among some of the best plug-ins to have come along for Finale were Jari Williamsson’s JW Tools. MakeMusic recognized this when they added native installation of eight of the most popular and powerful of these tools to Finale in v. 27.3.

If you have Finale v. 27.3 or later, you have these eight tools as part of your Finale installation and don’t need to do anything else to get them. These are also the only JW plug-ins to run natively on Apple silicon Macs.

For the others that Jari created, they are available for free on Notation Central, our marketplace for music notation software technology, as a way of exposing them to more users, but you need to manually install them and follow the specific instructions to find file paths on your computer. On Macs with Apple silicon “M” series processors, if you want to use these plug-ins other than the eight bundled with Finale v. 27.3, you’ll need to run Finale in Rosetta mode. Even then, they are not guaranteed to work in all instances, and won’t be developed further. Jari’s Finale Tips site, which he maintained for many years, is no longer available.

Keyboard Maestro

If you rely on Keyboard Maestro for increasing efficiency in Finale on Mac, you’ll need to make sure that it gets installed on whichever computer (or partition) that Finale ends up on for the long-term.

One Keyboard Maestro license allows for use on up to five computers, so that should be plenty for most users. Transferring the macros themselves is rather easy as well.

Hopefully you’ve organized your Finale Macros into Groups in Keyboard Maestro, and if you were slick about it, you may have named them something with the same beginning, like here:

If it’s organized like this, all you need to do is select all of the Macro Groups that are related to Finale, right-click (Control-click) one of the selected groups, and choose the option Export (#) Macro Group(s):

Or select them and go to the File Menu > Export and choose the option to Export as Macro Library…. Both functions do the same thing.

Once you have that library file of Macro Groups, move it to the new location where Finale will live and where you have already installed Keyboard Maestro. Simply double-click that Macro Group Library file, and all of those Groups and the Macros inside them will get installed into Keyboard Maestro on that computer.

You also may have to go to each Macro Group to make sure that the Available in these applications: options are set to Finale for that computer.

Finale manual and other official resources

As mentioned in our previous article, MakeMusic has told Scoring Notes that their official resources will remain online after August 25. Users will be able to access the User Manuals (from Finale v27 all the way back to Finale 2009).

But did you know that you can download the manual for offline access?

Go to this page on the MakeMusic site, where you’ll find links to download the manual for both Mac and Windows (Finale has a separate manual that is specific to each operating system). Each one of these is basically a large zip file with all of the web pages and assets contained within it, and will look something like this once it’s opened:

The trick is to open the file called Finale.htm. Leave all the other files in place and don’t move anything around. The Finale.htm file will open in a web browser and behave just like the online manual; the only difference is that all of the manual’s HTML assets are contained in that folder, which is now locally stored on your computer instead of in the cloud on MakeMusic’s servers.

In addition to the manual, users will be able to access the Finale Knowledge Base, the Finale Community, and even the old MakeMusic Forum, which was locked and archived at the end 2016.

Other resources

Apart from the official MakeMusic resources and their other official tutorials, and the plug-ins, there are many third-party resources available for Finale.

It’s a little hard to speculate exactly how long those resources will be maintained, but it’s probably safe to assume that they’re not going to vanish overnight. The Finale Forum (not associated with MakeMusic) is still available and actually seems quite active even now. The Finale Powerusers group and Finale 101 group on Facebook each claim more than 10,000 members. (The official Finale Facebook page is still active, but is now only being used to promote the Dorico crossgrade.)

We can assure everyone, given that one half of this authorship duo is its creator, that the Conquering Finale YouTube Channel will stay up indefinitely, even though there likely won’t be any more new videos created. Even if the website renewal lapses in the near future, all of those videos are cross-posted on Scoring Notes as well. So there are plenty of ways to still find and watch those tutorials.

Speaking of Scoring Notes, all of the Finale-related content will remain here as well.

Summary

It should still be possible to use Finale pretty far into the future if you take some of the steps above related to hardware and software. Many of the resources that you might need to assist you should still be around for a while.

But at some point, continuing with Finale might become too burdensome, so the next article in this series will outline some strategies for archiving all of your Finale files as you start to Leave Finale Behind.