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The End of Finale

finalemusic.com

41–50 of 183 posts

Re: The End of Finale

#41

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…

Nice to read this. I was taught finale when I was in school in the early 00s. I went on to study music (as a performer) and my notational needs were covered by writing by hand or by lilypond).

I never though anything would actually threaten Sibelius or Finale, so reading about a new (and good) product has flbeen great.

Maybe it introduces new ways composers can make strange errors when writing music :)

Re: The End of Finale

#42
post #34

I am wondering if they cleared this with their lawyers? At a minimum it looks like a variant of a binding resale price, which is not legal in the EU. Yes, Dorico is selling their own product, but it is based on the ownership of of finale. On the other hand it seems pretty obvious that a lot of value is being created for the customers.

There's no resale here? EU resale law is mostly around the fact that makers can't dictate to shops or other resellers what their sale price should be.

Vendors - whether original makers or resellers - are free to offer differential pricing to customers, as long as they don't break equality laws.

Re: The End of Finale

#43
post #21
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…

They just announced that they're stealing back the product they sold to their erstwhile customers. "It could be way worse" is a hell of a response to that.

"We just stopped support for your Silverado. You can drive it for one more year, then we're coming to take it out of your garage. We have a deal with Ford for you to get an F-150 with a discount."

"It could be way worse, at least I get to use it for another year, I hope they're getting a kickback from Ford."

Re: The End of Finale

#44
Gosh - that's a blast from the past!

I remember back in the 90's when studying for my Music A-Level you essentially had two choices for notation - Finale if you were on a PC, and Sibelius if you had an Acorn.

For that reason, the music department at my school had Acorn Archimedes and then Acorn RiscPC machines.

Sibelius was the all around better piece of software - but I "only" had a windows PC at home, so it was Finale or nothing.

Re: The End of Finale

#45

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.

Indeed, I have heard that at least early versions of Finale had painfully unmaintainable code that severely slowed its development.

This supposedly was/is in part because Finale's original author Phil Farrand [1] was a musician turned self-taught programmer and Finale was only his second software product.

[1] https://philfarrand.com/biography/

Re: The End of Finale

#46
post #42
post #34

I am wondering if they cleared this with their lawyers? At a minimum it looks like a variant of a binding resale price, which is not legal in the EU. Yes, Dorico is selling their own product, but it is based on the ownership of of finale. On the other hand it seems pretty obvious that a lot of value is being created for the customers.

There's no resale here? EU resale law is mostly around the fact that makers can't dictate to shops or other resellers what their sale price should be. Vendors - whether original makers or resellers - are free to offer differential pricing to customers, as long as they don't break equality laws.

I am absolutely not saying that it is clear something is illegal here, but there kind of is a resale, the product being sold is an upgrade from finale to dorico, which can only be sold if finale confirms the existance of a finale license. And the parties have obviously agree what the price must be.

Re: The End of Finale

#47

Time for them to release the source code then.

Releasing source code (especially under a permissive license) would be extremely hard, even more so with software that old. There could be small 3rd party modules buried in the code base whose original developer is impossible to find, or could have passed years ago and they have no ways to contact anyone who owns the rights, let alone have everyone of them agree on open sourcing and under which license. There would b…

They could just not release the code they don't have the rights to, and release the code they do have rights to

Re: The End of Finale

#48

Gosh - that's a blast from the past! I remember back in the 90's when studying for my Music A-Level you essentially had two choices for notation - Finale if you were on a PC, and Sibelius if you had an Acorn. For that reason, the music department at my school had Acorn Archimedes and then Acorn RiscPC machines. Sibelius was the all around better piece of software - but I "only" had a windows PC at home, so it was Fin…

A bit later on in the mid 2000s when I 100% wasn't cheating my way through GCSE Music, Sibelius on Windows PC was the standard.

Re: The End of Finale

#49
As people are talking about Dorico, a little story about how it happened (and, very nearly, didn't).

So Sibelius began as a project by the Finn brothers, then in their early 20s in Cambridge, some time around 1990. Originally it was written for the Acorn Archimedes, a British desktop computer running on ARM RISC processors. (They were decent machines, but having a big platform for native software was THE thing that mattered for personal computing in the 90s, and being essentially UK-only, Archimedes as a platform was doomed - as with Clive Sinclair's C5 light EV, the right idea at the wrong time).

Sibelius grew and thrived for 15 years, porting to PC & Mac on the way, enjoying wide adoption in education especially outside the US, growing to maybe 50 or 100 people, and became Finale's main competitor. In the mid 2000's they were acquired by Avid, who saw the potential to tie in its notation platform with their recording packages for Hollywood and other media composers. The founders stepped back, received royal awards from the Queen, and have kept a fairly low profile since.

Things carried on OK for a few years, but then when the financial crisis hits, the suits and bean-counters running Avid got Ideas. And you know that's not going to end well.

So to understand the importance of what happens next, you need to realise that there are maybe as few as a hundred people in the world who understand both music engraving and C++ application development to an advanced level. Either skill on its own, no big deal. Both together? The Venn overlap on that is _tiny_.

And at that point in time, twenty or thirty of them were working for Sibelius, the same again or a few more at Coda MakeMusic working on Finale, and a handful of others at minor competitors and F/OSS contenders such as Rosegarden. This is 2009 ish - before the mobile/tablet revolution really gets going, and interactive Web apps aren't quite at the maturity level to do professional-quality music engraving with smooth, low-latency UI.

So the top-level Avid suits find out that Western senior engineer salaries are $70K or thereabouts, whereas you can hire a senior engineer in Ukraine for $12K, and send out a decree that ALL engineering functions will be offshored to their development partner in Kiev.

I'm not knocking the Ukrainians. Clever, well-educated, innovative and hard-working to a (wo)man. But... rapidly offshoring a codebase with 15 years of history, addressing what is a very highly specialised domain, almost a culture in its own right, which the vast majority of contract engineers would have zero understanding of?

So, yep. Avid has a profitable (I assume) product, a mature team consisting of a third of the people in the world with that skill set, most of whom are doing it for the love and none of whom are overpaid, and what do the bean-counters do?

Yep, you guessed it. Fire the lot. "For the stock price!"

Now the professional composer community isn't huge. But they're sharp as a pin and well-connected, and this news is, obviously, not taken well. Thankfully the team's PM, Daniel Spreadbury, has the presence of mind to phone a friend at Yamaha-Steinberg. And over the next few weeks they're able to hammer out a deal where almost the entire engineering team is re-hired.

The way I heard it told, he convinced them to give him and his team three years and sufficient budget to build a "new Sibelius". In the end, it took them five-and-a-half, but such is the way of software projects.

So anyway, kudos to Daniel Spreadbury and whoever at Yamaha-Steinberg had the foresight to invest in this. And the opposite to the suits at Avid, who seem to have been bought out by a PE firm last year. So I guess triple yachts all round for them.

Re: The End of Finale

#50
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems quite ridiculous to not just release a free version with no support, no updates, no DRM. It's like they're going out of their way to destroy their legacy. I'd hate to be one of the devs.

This is just a guess, but maybe the struck a deal with Steinberg that does not allow them to do this?

It’s a hell of a way to treat your customers who may have spent thousands of dollars on your software over the decades.

Exactly what I’d expect from MakeMusic though, they have always been shysters.

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