RIP Finale 1989-2024

[RJVB]

Hahaha, i'm a dinosaur. Still on Sierra ;-). It's 10.12.6. Latest possible OS on my machine would be Monterey .......

As long as you can still get up-to-date browsers there is no rush to make that final little upgrade - and there's always GitHub - blueboxd/chromium-legacy: Latest Chromium (≒Chrome Canary/Stable) for Mac OS X 10.7+ which works on (Mac) OS X 10.7+

Regardless, you know that you can clone your boot (internal) drive onto an external and boot off that, right? I use an old copy of Carbon Copy Cloner for that but it's also possible to do it completely by hand (remember to "bless" the new volume first). On newer Macs that might require tweaking things (turning off security features) in the OpenFirmware but your machine shouldn't have them already (or to a lesser extent).
Anyway, you could upgrade your internal drive but keep a bootable copy of your current configuration, which will allow you to run Finale or any other application that fails under the new OS.

[RJVB]

Also, what other export options does Finale have? In my experience with MuseScore you lose a *lot* when exporting to mXML. The notes will be there of course, it's the things that are typically even more cumbersome/time-consuming to enter, like fingerings and other forms of non-standard text.

If you can get your hands on an free version/evaluation copy it might be worthwile to see how far you can get with copy/paste between the applications. It probably won't work or it might use mXML behind the scenes but you never know.

[jzucker]

i switched to musescore a couple years ago. I like it a lot better than finale, it's open source so no-cost and no bullying into upgrades.

[jzucker]

do you guys upgrading to corporate dorico understand what open-source software is about? Open source software is open to anyone who wants to use it or develop with it. There is a core group of engineers who control what changes can be merged into the release code and from what i've seen, these engineers and standards are higher than the typical development standards by corporations. It's very tightly controlled and have to pass requirements, usability and functional/integration tests to end up in the end-user application. The source license cannot be revoked so you don't have to worry about it being pulled out from under you.


I don't get why anyone would pay another corporation's ransom when musescore is available?

[charleyrich99]

i switched to musescore a couple years ago. I like it a lot better than finale, it's open source so no-cost and no bullying into upgrades.

How does it handle guitar specific notation like fingerings, strings, position, etc? I've done those with finale, but found them to he very difficult and non intuitive. Is musescore better?

[Bop Head]

How does it handle guitar specific notation like fingerings, strings, position, etc? I've done those with finale, but found them to he very difficult and non intuitive. Is musescore better?

I have neither used Finale nor used much guitar specific notation in Musescore.

But I just found a YouTube channel called Your Guitar Score that seems to deal exclusively with Musescore guitar notation, so decide for yourself.

Here is the guitar related stuff in the handbook.

I find Musescore quite intuitive. And there is a helpful community. I have almost always found a solution for something I wanted to do by simply google-ing for my question and following links to the forum. Make sure to search for "Musescore 4" as some things have changed a little since version 3.

EDIT: The Notatio forum is another place you could go to asking for help. This is a place where notation pros (like composers or professional engravers) hang out. Very nice and helpful people.

EDIT 2: The people at the Notatio forum discuss Lilypond and Musescore as well. That should clear any doubt about those open-source apps being professionally applicable.

[grahambop]

How does it handle guitar specific notation like fingerings, strings, position, etc? I've done those with finale, but found them to he very difficult and non intuitive. Is musescore better?

I think it’s much better than the (admittedly quite old) version of Finale I have.

There is a guitar palette and a fingerings palette with all sorts of useful stuff, and you can just click a fingering symbol and attach it to a note.

Also does tab for any permutation of strings and tunings, even does lute tablature.

[jzucker]

How does it handle guitar specific notation like fingerings, strings, position, etc? I've done those with finale, but found them to he very difficult and non intuitive. Is musescore better?

It does everything finale does with fretboard diagrams. Tab and is better. There is a plugin that allows you to enter notes via fretboard diagram too. I don't use it though.

There is no scale fretboard diagram tool in either program.

[sgcim]

MS seems to cater to the classical end of things more than the jazz end. Last rehearsal we had, the leader told me a guitar player wanted to sit in on one of my charts, while I led the band.
I told him alright, but out of some 80 modern jazz BB charts, there are only two that I bothered to write out a guitar part for; two measures for a Steely Dan tune I deranged, and four measures for a 1960s psychedelic rock tune i jazzified. Both parts sound good for the tunes, because they require a rock sound, but I still don't hear any use for their guitar sounds in anything else I've written.
Even with the most up to date library it has, it still sounds like some rockabilly dude got lost, and stumbled into a jazz session. I even took RJVB's advice and replaced a guitar part with two other instruments, depriving them of their only break in that section.

The drums still don't have a brushes sound, which the ballads need.
Still, with Finale's demise, I consider myself lucky to have such a great 'studio' system.

[jzucker]

MS seems to cater to the classical end of things more than the jazz end.

DISAGREE TOTALLY. Musescore has a really good understanding of jazz chords and interprets them correctly. For example, you can enter E7b9#9#5b5 and it'll put the correct symbol in and playback the correct chord. Finale can not do it. It also has various guitar options for playback. And the jazz font and swing options are really good as well.

One of the principal developers there is a jazz pianist and I assume he ensures that the software works well for jazz.

And, because the software is open source, if you are a developer, you can add any features you want. Whether they get merged into the public release is subject to code reviews and requirements of course. But it also means, that there are public discussions on functionality so if there is a feature you are looking for, you can start a public conversation about it and if there is enough support for it, it will be added to the group requirements and scheduled for implementation.

[jzucker]

By the way, finale can bulk export an entire folder (and subfolder) at one time. You don't have to export each file separately.

[RJVB]

And the jazz font

Yeah, and the jazz font. What's that about (aside rendering things hard to read)? Assuming you were talking about a text font, of course.

About the open source nature: while MS is open source it is now owned by (IIRC) the same corporate entity that bought Audacity. For comparison: Chromium and WebKit are open source too, but the main browsers built on them (Google Chrome and Safari) are not (or not completely). The future will tell if this will change anything for MS, and what.

[jzucker]

Yeah, and the jazz font. What's that about (aside rendering things hard to read)? Assuming you were talking about a text font, of course.

About the open source nature: while MS is open source it is now owned by (IIRC) the same corporate entity that bought Audacity. For comparison: Chromium and WebKit are open source too, but the main browsers built on them (Google Chrome and Safari) are not (or not completely). The future will tell if this will change anything for MS, and what.

I'm referring to the music font but they have a jazz text font as well. The source is not "owned". The corporation that owns the musescore.com site is a music publishing site that sells sheet music. It's not involved in the operations of the open source notation software. This is a very confusing thing for users but they are two different things.

And chrome and safari use the open source engine as a foundation. That doesn't have anything to do with the actual open-source portion of the code. Someone could concievable follow the open source license and build products ON TOP OF musescore but nobody has done this and the musescore program itself has zero in common with chrome or safari.

[Woody Sound]

I started with an old Finale version on floppies.

[RJVB]

The source is not "owned".

It wasn't when I started using it but from what I understood something changed. Not that I care (for now).

And chrome and safari use the open source engine as a foundation. That doesn't have anything to do with the actual open-source portion of the code.

Guess who are the major contributors to the 2 projects (in man hours and funding) and who thus control it, de facto?

Evidently I wasn't comparing MS as an application to a webbrowser (Chromium is probably "universal" enough to reimplement most if not all of MS in it but that's a different story).

[Petimar]

By the way, finale can bulk export an entire folder (and subfolder) at one time. You don't have to export each file separately.

Thanks much Jzucker!!! This will really save me as I have hundreds of Finale files to move to Musescore.

[Petimar]

I started with an old Finale version on floppies.

I still have 2.0 floppies.

Maybe a time for some house cleaning??

[sgcim]

DISAGREE TOTALLY. Musescore has a really good understanding of jazz chords and interprets them correctly. For example, you can enter E7b9#9#5b5 and it'll put the correct symbol in and playback the correct chord. Finale can not do it. It also has various guitar options for playback. And the jazz font and swing options are really good as well.

One of the principal developers there is a jazz pianist and I assume he ensures that the software works well for jazz.

And, because the software is open source, if you are a developer, you can add any features you want. Whether they get merged into the public release is subject to code reviews and requirements of course. But it also means, that there are public discussions on functionality so if there is a feature you are looking for, you can start a public conversation about it and if there is enough support for it, it will be added to the group requirements and scheduled for implementation.

One of the first things I did was to permanently disable the playback of chord symbols by the keyboard. It sounded like some classical pianist's/robot's interpretation of the chord symbols, and no jazz pianist would ever use those demented voicings.
I get around it by writing out my own voicings on my charts, with the silenced chord symbols above, so the pianist is free to play whatever fills he feels like playing.

I also write out the bass line for the entire piece, so I can have fun blowing over the changes with either just drums and bass accompaniment, or background figures by the horns.
I've had a lot of help from the pianist you mentioned, and he's a great guy and great player, who used to hang out at RMMGJ at one time, so he knows what's going on jazz-wise, but I doubt he's one of the 'principal developers" of MS.
From what I've read, the complexity of creating a program like MS ranks with the most involved processes of anything you can do as a computer engineer., band i doubt Marc Sabella studied computer engineering for the time it takes to create MS.

I'm not saying that the software doesn't work well for jazz; it works great! My charts have gotten me compliments from some world-class arrangers, but they use Sibelius and Finale, and point out some things in the performance aspect of the charts that I've had to resort to writing in pen some of the jumps and repeats that are easier to sight read in the other two programs.

They can only add so many of the demands the few jazz arrangers have about their playback shortcomings. Things like having a good jazz guitar sound, adding brushes on their drum sounds, and other things apparently don't have the support that other matters do.

[Bop Head]

One of the first things I did was to permanently disable the playback of chord symbols by the keyboard. It sounded like some classical pianist's/robot's interpretation of the chord symbols, and no jazz pianist would ever use those demented voicings.
I get around it by writing out my own voicings on my charts, with the silenced chord symbols above, so the pianist is free to play whatever fills he feels like playing.

I also write out the bass line for the entire piece, so I can have fun blowing over the changes with either just drums and bass accompaniment, or background figures by the horns.
I've had a lot of help from the pianist you mentioned, and he's a great guy and great player, who used to hang out at RMMGJ at one time, so he knows what's going on jazz-wise, but I doubt he's one of the 'principal developers" of MS.
From what I've read, the complexity of creating a program like MS ranks with the most involved processes of anything you can do as a computer engineer., band i doubt Marc Sabella studied computer engineering for the time it takes to create MS.

I'm not saying that the software doesn't work well for jazz; it works great! My charts have gotten me compliments from some world-class arrangers, but they use Sibelius and Finale, and point out some things in the performance aspect of the charts that I've had to resort to writing in pen some of the jumps and repeats that are easier to sight read in the other two programs.

They can only add so many of the demands the few jazz arrangers have about their playback shortcomings. Things like having a good jazz guitar sound, adding brushes on their drum sounds, and other things apparently don't have the support that other matters do.

I silence chord symbol playback as well but as far as I remember you can also edit the voicing types in Musescore.

I think Marc Sabatella (also author of "A Jazz Improvisation Primer" BTW) is more of an advisor from the musicians/user side than a programmer. And he is teaching Musescore on his YouTube channel.

Regarding those jumps and repeats: To be honest, is it possible that you just have not yet figured out how to do it? I am a regular visitor of the Notatio forum and I have seen very complex modern "classical" scores realized already with e.g. MS 2.

[jzucker]

Also, what other export options does Finale have? In my experience with MuseScore you lose a *lot* when exporting to mXML. The notes will be there of course, it's the things that are typically even more cumbersome/time-consuming to enter, like fingerings and other forms of non-standard text.

If you can get your hands on an free version/evaluation copy it might be worthwile to see how far you can get with copy/paste between the applications. It probably won't work or it might use mXML behind the scenes but you never know.

As I said before, MUSESCORE IS FREE.

THERE IS NO PAID VERSION OF MUSESCORE.

[jzucker]

One of the first things I did was to permanently disable the playback of chord symbols by the keyboard.

That's because you have the chord symbols set to *LITERAL*. If you have it set to literal, it will voice a G13 chord as G B D F A C E. Set your chords to jazz and you'll be happier.

[RJVB]

THERE IS NO PAID VERSION OF MUSESCORE.

No reason to shout, I never said MS exists in a paid version.

[sgcim]

I silence chord symbol playback as well but as far as I remember you can also edit the voicing types in Musescore.

I think Marc Sabatella (also author of "A Jazz Improvisation Primer" BTW) is more of an advisor from the musicians/user side than a programmer. And he is teaching Musescore on his YouTube channel.

Regarding those jumps and repeats: To be honest, is it possible that you just have not yet figured out how to do it? I am a regular visitor of the Notatio forum and I have seen very complex modern "classical" scores realized already with e.g. MS 2.

No, it's just a matter of MS not making their DS signs,Coda signs,etc really noticeable. It's also that classical musicians are much more thorough readers than jazz players. If you put a repeat sign for a classical player, they'll pick them up every time. With jazz players, even good readers might miss repeat signs and jumps, because the music is usually at a faster tempo, and they're not used to jumping around a lot, so it's got to be discussed beforehand, and you have to circle the tempo changes, key signature changes. time signature changes,etc...or someone's going to get lost.

I agree with you about Marc. He acts as an important intermediary between the engineers and their knowledge of jazz techniques, and always helps the few people on the jazz forums that have problems. Maybe there will be more jazz people using MS with the demise of Finale, but most of them will probably go to Sibelius or Dorico.

[Bop Head]

How do you do that on MS?

Do you know what RTFM means?

Chord symbols | MuseScore

[grahambop]

How do you do that on MS?

Format - Style - Chord symbols - Playback.

Change it from Literal to Jazz.

Regarding the repeat symbols etc., you may be able to make them globally larger? For a lead sheet, I made all the chord symbols larger by selecting them all and adjusting the font size in the Properties panel.

When selecting a specific element, there is an option to ‘select all of the same type’ or something like that, you can then apply a change to all of those elements in one go. Really useful. So you may be able to do this with repeat signs, although I haven’t tried it.