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The End of Finale

finalemusic.com

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Re: The End of Finale

#11

Post by pclmulqdq »

bcatanzaro wrote: post #7

I may be the only person who loves LilyPond but I really do love it. The LaTeX of music notation.

LilyPond is great, but the writing process for a lot of music involves a lot of playback, so integration with a half-decent playback engine is really useful. On top of that, you can do almost everything in Dorico and Sibelius with keyboard shortcuts, so they are very power-user-friendly (which is what I like about LaTeX).

Re: The End of Finale

#12

Post by pclmulqdq »

TheCleric wrote: post #3

Just open source it. You could spin this as a positive instead.

I assume that if Finale were open-sourced, the code would be so ugly that nobody who worked on it would ever be employable again. Finale also has some tight integration with its Midi player and audio output that may have some weird patented shit or Apple/MS proprietary jank.

Re: The End of Finale

#13

Post by sbuttgereit »

tjr wrote: post #4

I used Finale for years before switching to Sibelius about 13 years ago. I found Sibelius much easier to use, but I'm surprised that there aren't enough unmovable legacy Finale users to warrant continual maintenance of the product.

I'm in that camp. I've been using Finale since version 1. I tried Sibelius around the time you changed and it didn't quite but right with my use cases. I have to imagine that there are many like me that have years of muscle memory with the features (not to mention years of scores in the file format) who use it for to avoid having to worry about me software when they'd rather be focused on their music.

Of course... that's a business focused on casually milking an annuity... Not something that's growing. I guess not with it for the people that bought the company a few years ago.

Finally... Wonder what's happening with those Garritan sound libraries I've invested in....

Re: The End of Finale

#16

Post by pclmulqdq »

minebreaker wrote: post #15

For me there are so many basic features that are missing in the competitors. I tried Dorico but it can't even play trills properly.

If you're notating classical music and want to be able to listen to half decent playback, I would suggest buying NotePerformer and working with MuseScore before buying one of the "fancy" notation packages. Dorico's default playback is worse than Finale's Aria player.

Re: The End of Finale

#17

Post by computerdork »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #10

I switched from Finale to Dorico about a year ago. It was like night and day in terms of user-friendliness. Finale felt heavily loaded down with legacy garbage. On Windows, it (really the Aria player) insisted on complete ownership of my audio output, too, which was a real pain.

Did the same thing about the same time - consulted with a composition professor, and he said that he didn't know anyone that was using Finale, so realized it was time to switch after using for 2 decades.

Agreed about the user-friendliness. Dorico is one of the most well thought-out, beautiful pieces of software I've seen. Really like the idea of modes - it's a bit complex at first, but think more software should do this. It's a really good way to separate features into different areas, to prevent the shotgun approach that most pieces of large software use, of just splattering features everywhere.

Still, end of an era.

Re: The End of Finale

#18

Post by tomphoolery »

Finale was my first notation program, and while I switched to Sibelius out of necessity during college, I never really liked it. Will definitely check out Dorico, heard good things!

Re: The End of Finale

#19

Post by pclmulqdq »

computerdork wrote: post #17
pclmulqdq wrote: post #10

I switched from Finale to Dorico about a year ago. It was like night and day in terms of user-friendliness. Finale felt heavily loaded down with legacy garbage. On Windows, it (really the Aria player) insisted on complete ownership of my audio output, too, which was a real pain.

Did the same thing about the same time - consulted with a composition professor, and he said that he didn't know anyone that was using Finale, so realized it was time to switch after using for 2 decades. Agreed about the user-friendliness. Dorico is one of the most well thought-out, beautiful pieces of software I've seen. Really like the idea of modes - it's a bit complex at first, but think more software should do t…

Yeah, I had been a finale user for >10 years, and it was a slow deterioration on MakeMusic's part, but I got frog boiled by it.
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