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The End of Finale

finalemusic.com

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Re: The End of Finale

#21

Post by dahart »

genter wrote: post #2

> It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale Well that seems like a dick move. > MakeMusic has partnered with Steinberg to offer an exclusive discount on Dorico Pro. So can we assume MakeMusic is getting a kickback for every sale of Dorico? If that's the case, of course they're going to stop you from reinstalling Finale.

Sheesh, kinda harsh. The reauthorize deadline isn’t until a year from now. And I wouldn’t assume anything, but I hope they’re making a kickback from sales of Dorico. Given the discount price, even if your assumption is true, it can’t be that much money.

This isn’t some kind of massive win for MakeMusic, nor is it greed if they get a little money for moving people to another product. They’re shutting down what once was their flagship product. There’s more competition now, the codebase is heavy with legacy cruft, maybe it’s no fun at all to work on, or maybe they’re losing customers and are unable to make a living on Finale. It’s hard and painful to shut down a once-successful project, especially for people who’ve worked hard on it for a long time. I can’t help but empathize a little.

It could be way worse, they could be shutting down new authorizations today. Companies and products that die do that all the time. Giving the customers a year to deal with it and a steeply discounted upgrade path is relatively kind.

Re: The End of Finale

#22

Post by dahart »

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.

> Finale felt heavily loaded down with legacy garbage

It seems like the letter fully confirms & validates your feeling. ;) There’s just no GUI software started 35 years ago that’s still alive and feels modern and unbloated. Okay, there might be something, but I want to see the examples that prove me wrong. Things that come to mind are like Photoshop or Word, both bloated with legacy and might be dying to web apps. Or Windows itself, also loaded down with legacy. UX standards and expectations have (thankfully) gone way up over time, and it’s practically impossible to keep up without starting over with fresh applications, especially for boutique shops.

Re: The End of Finale

#23

Post by computerdork »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #19
computerdork wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

frog-boiled, haha, good way to put it:)

Re: The End of Finale

#24

Post by tjr »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #13
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... th…

Exactly, years of muscle memory and files. If I was involuntarily forced off of Sibelius at this point, I would be rather annoyed. I'm not even sure what I would do. Last time I tried it, Dorico did not support everything I needed to do, even if I wanted to use it.

Re: The End of Finale

#26

Post by ralphc »

I have a copy of Allegro on a XP laptop, it's a case of it still doing everything I need it to do. I moved to macs around 2005, got a version of Allegro for it but basically every time I installed something new Allegro acted like it was a whole new machine and it was a pain to re-enable it, so I just stuck with the XP version.

I understand wanting to get paid but the Finale family was so onerous in copy protection that it deserves its fate.

Re: The End of Finale

#27

Post by wvenable »

dahart wrote: post #21
genter wrote: post #2

> It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale Well that seems like a dick move. > MakeMusic has partnered with Steinberg to offer an exclusive discount on Dorico Pro. So can we assume MakeMusic is getting a kickback for every sale of Dorico? If that's the case, of course they're going to stop you from reinstalling Finale.

Sheesh, kinda harsh. The reauthorize deadline isn’t until a year from now. And I wouldn’t assume anything, but I hope they’re making a kickback from sales of Dorico. Given the discount price, even if your assumption is true, it can’t be that much money. This isn’t some kind of massive win for MakeMusic, nor is it greed if they get a little money for moving people to another product. They’re shutting down what once wa…

> It could be way worse

So they chopped off your finger, it could be worse they could have taken the whole hand!

The right thing to do is release a version that doesn't require authorization at all.

Re: The End of Finale

#28

Post by TylerE »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #11
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).

Plus, as professional software used by people along (mostly not very much) money with it, productivity is key. Lilypond loses badly here.

I can enter 200 or 300 bars in Dorico in the time I could do 20 in Lilypond - and that’s at the rate I could manage when I was using lilypond regularly.

I also think the output is nicer, which also matters here.

Re: The End of Finale

#30

Post by junon »

dahart wrote: post #21
genter wrote: post #2

> It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale Well that seems like a dick move. > MakeMusic has partnered with Steinberg to offer an exclusive discount on Dorico Pro. So can we assume MakeMusic is getting a kickback for every sale of Dorico? If that's the case, of course they're going to stop you from reinstalling Finale.

Sheesh, kinda harsh. The reauthorize deadline isn’t until a year from now. And I wouldn’t assume anything, but I hope they’re making a kickback from sales of Dorico. Given the discount price, even if your assumption is true, it can’t be that much money. This isn’t some kind of massive win for MakeMusic, nor is it greed if they get a little money for moving people to another product. They’re shutting down what once wa…

Some important context here is that Tantacrul has a history of buying up music or audio related software (some of which is Open Source, e.g. Audacity) and trying to take it in New Directions™ in ways nobody wants or asked for.

For example, the entire Audacity Google Analytics debacle, and how he basically insulted the entire community when there was an outrage over GA being silently added.

MuseScore I'm less familiar with but I do recall people being upset about how some of that went down, too.

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