Losing Finale

A little bit of bad news here … Most likely, you haven’t noticed that something major had just occurred in the music industry. I laugh because while my Facebook friends are talking up TV shows, politics, memes, and such; my own feed has been filled with many dealing with this catastrophic music event. Let me explain …

For over three decades, I have been using Finale, which is kind of like word processing for music. You can type in notes, add dynamics, markings, etc., nudge things, and before you know it, you have a professional-looking product — well, if you’re good at Finale, that is. And it has taken me a long time to get there.

Finale was the first such software that brought this kind of power to all musicians in the early 90s. Eventually other competitors arose: Sibelius was the only one to come close to Finale’s popularity, and in some ways it has become even better. Though, most recently, Dorico, originally made of people who had been fired by Sibelius (oh yeah — there’s a whole soap opera going on here — can’t wait for the movie), is speedily catching up, and may already be more powerful than Finale and Sibelius. And MuseScore, a freeware alternative is also growing and becoming almost professional-level useable.

But let me tell you — these programs all have a steep learning curve. In the past decade, I had been very annoyed with Finale’s bugs that they couldn’t seem to fix: such as lyric extension lines that random extend all the way to the end of a piece even though I’ve inserted a hard space to stop it. I probably would have switched to Sibelius or Dorico much sooner, but then I’d have to start over from Square 1 — well, almost.

And then last month, MakeMusic announced that they were ending Finale. When I first got the email, I had to reread it multiple times to make sure it wasn’t saying what I thought it was saying. But no — it was saying it. In one year, all maintenance will be stopped. Already, it is no longer possible to buy any more licenses.

Also, there’s no easy way to preserve the files that we’ve created in their current forms. And I have over a thousand of these files, whether they be my own compositions or Melkim Publishing files. The only way to transfer to another program is to open the old file in Finale, export as MusicXML, and then hope it translates correctly into the other program. I’m going to have to go through all my files and save them as MusicXML.

There’s this real danger that eventually all these archived Finale files will become unreadable. And that’s unfathomable — a whole chunk of music disappearing from the Earth. Though, I think eventually someone will build a free application that can read old Finale files and convert them to MusicXML.

So, I’m not too worried about losing all my music, but I am very worried at the upcoming learning curve. It’s going to disrupt my output as I learn the new software.

BTW, that new software is going to be Dorico (and perhaps a little bit of MuseScore). I think they’re on a roll and will likely be around until I stop producing music. Sibelius almost went under a few years ago and is starting to suffer from the same pains Finale had: spaghetti code that becomes increasingly difficult to update.

Dorico appears to have a LOT more automated features — self-nudging objects, and near-full control over all automation settings. So, it looks like once I get things going, it’s going to save a considerable amount of time. You know those orchestrations I’ve been working on all year? Well, all the clean up I’ve been doing for the last few months would all be automated. So — yeah — I’m very excited about that prospect, as it will mean I will be able to build up our catalog much faster.

But first, I gotta learn. It’s going to take a lot of time to set up the house style, and build a template file that I can use going forward. As such, I’m making the following decisions:

• I’m going to hold off building up our catalog during 2025 while I learn the new software and set things up. (Though, I may still push one or two pieces.)
• Instead, I’m going to devote more time to outreach. With the orchestrations coming out in a couple of weeks, we’ll have a sufficiently filled-out “starting” catalog. In fact, more than 90% of my time these past 7 years has been in building up the catalog and putting together our first two albums. So during 2025, I’m going to concentrate more on advertising, getting the word out, finding more friends and colleagues, and … well … let a LOT more people know that we exist. An impressive catalog doesn’t mean much unless people know about it.

So, I’m taking this setback, and I’m turning it into future strength.

How have you been affected by the demise of Finale?