8/26/24

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As most of you have read by now, MakeMusic just announced that they are sunsetting the Finale Music Notation Software. I am as shocked about it as everyone! Finale survived the release of Sibelius, the release of Dorico, and most recently a global pandemic that put everything on the sidelines! So why this is happening today is definitely surprising.

 

First, some advice:


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• If you're a Mac user, be aware that Apple is about to release a new OS soon called Sequoia. If you want (need) to keep running Finale for as long as you can, do NOT upgrade to Sequoia. The new Mac OS's always add some bugs to Finale, and it seems as though there will be no further maintenance updates to Finale v27 forthcoming.

• MakeMusic has announced that they are partnering with Dorico to provide a discounted crossgrade for all Finale users, but don't interpret that to mean Dorico will be able to open Finale files. (It's possible that in the future, Dorico might add some functionality that may be able to open a .musx file, but don't hold your breath, it's unlikely, and frankly, I can't imagine it would be worth the effort on their part to do that). So, if you have important music in Finale that you want to keep for the future, start exporting XML files out of Finale as soon as you can. I would suggest that you print everything that you need to PDF as well. XML export and import is not a perfect transition, so it will be helpful to see what it had originally looked like.

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On a personal note, this is an extremely upsetting turn of events for me, the 10's of thousands of Finale users, and especially the people that have dedicated a LOT of time in recent years writing RGP Lua scripts, Keyboard Maestro routines, plug-ins, etc. for Finale. As a Musical Theater performer, I'm no stranger to the feeling of closing a show, and this seems just as gut-punching, if not more so in a lot of ways.

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Finale will still be viable for a while, and I will surely still be using it, at least in the short-term future, but I imagine that eventually I will be migrating my copying work to both Sibelius and Dorico. Having used both of them quite a bit in the last few years, they both have plusses and minuses, so I'll have to see where I wind up eventually. But I know that I will definitely miss the power and flexibility that Finale has.

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As far as Conquering Finale is concerned, I will leave this website active for as long as seems practical. Actually, I already have a couple of ideas to do some videos soon on converting to XML and opening in Sibelius and Dorico, which I think will be super helpful to everyone. But obviously, it's not gonna be worth it for me to keep making videos for a program that is being sunsetted.

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But thanks for all you support along the way, thanks for all the donations, comments, etc.  It's been most appreciated!

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I'm sure I'll have more to say in the next few days and weeks, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime... ugh... I'm with you. Devastated!