Finale for Finale
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Got an email from MakeMusic, the developer/publisher of Finale the music notation software, that they have ceased the development, maintenance, and distribution of Finale.
The email says all these changes are effective immediately. I don't even have a chance to buy/download the latest revision.
I have many compositions notated using Finale. I am sad to see it go away.
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I'm not using it these days, but years ago I had an early version. A lot of people will be upset by this!
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I never used Finale but I used to use Sibelius a lot for the marching band. It was fine, but had some quirks that drove me crazy and the licensing situation was super annoying (there was no way to just buy the software - you had to pay forever to subscribe to it and the licensing software would periodically randomly decide you didn't pay and kick you out -- sometimes for weeks at a time til you got it straightened out. It's so bad.....so bad that I'm in the market for a new DAW and I refuse to even consider ProTools (another Avid product) because of the awful experience I had with Avid's sibelius licensing.
Now that I'm not doing band, I couldn't justify paying $99/year for Sibelius, so I switched to Musescore - it's free and open source-ish. Over the last few years, they've put some money into upgrading it so while it is still free, it is a lot better than it used to be.....don't know if their ultimate plan is to charge for it or not, but for now there's no charge and it seems to do everything I needed to do with sibelius (and actually seems to crash a lot less often than sibelius did). All the notation software programs seem to have their quirks so I figure it's either pay $$$$ to slog my way through learning something new or learn something new that doesn't cost money right now, so I went with option B.
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I have been meaning to learn musescore... I signed up for a music theory class on ... Coursera? Or something else, I actually don't remember. It's one of those things you can do whenever, which is kind of worse because then I just keep putting it off.
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I took the "cross-grade" offer and is transitioning to Dorico.
Just ran through a few of the demos that shipped with Dorico 5.
So far so good.
Dorico takes up even more (a lot more) disk space than Finale.
If nothing else, at least Dorico is Apple silicon native -- something I suspect MakeMusic/Finale will not be able to do just because it doesn't look like MakeMusic can afford to invest enough to make the transition to Apple silicon.
At some point I will also have to try to move some Garritan virtual instrument sounds/libraries that I have paid good money (to MakeMusic) for over to Dorico. MakeMusic says that will work, but we will see.
