It's Time to Let Finale Die

(I am so sorry for the clickbait-ey title. I thought I was better than this.)

I picked up my first copy of Finale in 2011 at the educational discount price of $149 CAD. I could not have known how this decision would influence my entire life’s direction. I wrote my first orchestral première in Finale 2012. I wrote my first complex graphic scores with Finale 2014. Finale v26 is the foundation on which I built my music preparation and publishing business. It is an extremely powerful tool that can still hold its own against competitors, and it’s a meaningful piece of my upbringing that holds a special place in my heart. I empathise with the thousands of users who are upset about yesterday’s news that MakeMusic is ceasing development on Finale. I am one of you.

I think the user base needs to take a moment to grieve. This may take the form of righteous anger, despair, or sombre reflection. For composers, it might be the familiar twang of panic, with yet another “admin thing” being dumped onto their already too-full plate. I don’t think it’s silly at all to have strong emotions about a piece of software; this is a tool that has been a defining feature of hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of peoples’ lives. And in any case, software isn’t a tool in the same way that a hammer is a tool, manufactured for a single purpose, but a quasi-living being. Like a houseplant, it undergoes a life cycle and requires regular maintenance.

Unlike a houseplant, though, Finale’s roots are vast and deep. It has become a colossal, unwieldy spruce tree, inflexible and groaning under the weight of its codebase, unable to accommodate shifts in the landscape. It has been an unshakeable pillar of the music industry since its launch in 1988, but the reality is that it’s no longer a load-bearing pillar.

GATINEAU, QUÉBEC: The splash screen for Finale v27, its final version.

It’s Time to Let Finale Die

If we are grieving the loss of an old friend/houseplant/spruce tree (sorry for the mixed metaphor), then I’m in the acceptance stage. I never had any insider knowledge, but I made the decision to switch to Dorico as my primary notation software back in 2021. I saw Finale’s demise coming, as did most people with a close eye on the state of music notation technology.

I may have waxed poetic about it in the intro, if I’m looking at Finale dispassionately, it has plenty of clear shortcomings. Here are just my five biggest gripes:

• It has no native object collision detection;
• as a result, tweaking staff spacing and page layout is a time-consuming manual process
• Aligning dynamics requires tons of manual nudging with third-party plug-ins
• Text and graphic formatting is sub-standard, making it difficult to generate covers and front matter without using an external application
• It cannot handle SVG import.

I’m not writing this blog post to complain about Finale, though. I will dearly miss its note input tools, which are still more effective than the competition. It also draws slurs better than any other software, particularly to and from grace notes. Finale can always bend to your will, which is why there are so many devoted power users. The craftiest among them were always finding ways to mitigate or eliminate the issues like those I listed above. 10 years ago, Jan Angermüller of elbsound.studio developed Perfect Layout, an entire software package grafted onto Finale that basically upgrades it to a vastly better version of itself.

 
You can still buy Perfect Layout on elbsound.studio's website!

This is impressive and all, but what about the average user who doesn’t want to drop $500 for this additional product? Finale has been clearly falling behind their competition as updates have significantly slowed in recent years. This was already noticeable leading up to the release of v27 in June 2021, and there hasn't been any updates to Finale at all since November 2023. Infamously, there are lines in the codebase dating back to Finale version 1 - it has reached a point where you truly can't fix anything without breaking something else or messing with some segment of your userbase's workflows.

A major hint came after MakeMusic’s customary summer sale 2022, when they decided to keep the price of their product lower, permanently. Finale would henceforth only be $299 USD for new users and $99 USD for upgrades/crossgrades. This is considerably cheaper than the competition and to me seemed like a clear sign that development was slowing down.

As far as major feature implementations, there have really only been two in the past four years. The v27 update in 2021 added SMuFL implementation, an impressive feat by the developers which brought thousands of less-common musical symbols, previously the domain of only devoted power users, into the fold of Finale’s native support. Explaining SMuFL is beyond the scope of this article (you can read more in Philip Rothman’s Finale retrospective), but it’s not a reach to say this brought it more into alignment with Steinberg and Dorico. (as of August 2024, Sibelius is still not SMuFL compliant!)

The second big update was MusicXML 4.0 and the related release of the Dolet 8 plugin, improving file conversion between competing softwares. You could say this was solely to serve their associated educational product MakeMusic Cloud, but I am an optimist. I think the update to the MusicXML spec was at least in part, a goodwill gesture to the music community at large, spearheaded by Michael Good before his official retirement in 2023.

In any case, both SMuFL and MusicXML 4.0 are very future-looking projects and perhaps suggested that they wanted to at least keep Finale files reasonably usable into the 2030s. However, even die-hard fans were starting to call it “legacy software” or “end-of-life software.” Perhaps the Finale team saw the same writing on the wall that many of its users could see.

GATINEAU, QUÉBEC: Creating lead sheets in Finale v27.

Let’s talk about software obsolescence.

Is That All There Is?

Back in March, my friend and Ukrainian music scholar Zachary Senick contacted me with an unusual request. He was in touch with the widow of a late Ukrainian composer and was looking to perform some of his works. The only existing copies his wife was able to dig up were in the .enc file format, meaning they would only run in Encore music notation software.

In what-core music notation what?? The brainchild of one highly talented developer, Encore first launched in 1984 and was a robust tool for the time. A lot has changed in the 40 years since; increasingly powerful computers can run increasingly sophisticated software which requires increasingly large teams of developers. Its latest version was released in 2008, and periodically updated up until 2015. It died a slow and quiet death; as a 32-bit application, Encore 5 stopped working entirely upon the release of MacOS Catalina in 2019.

Opening Zach’s files, then, was quite a challenge. Encore’s developer officially shut down operations a few years ago, but I was able to acquire a copy from an acquaintance. Even with an emulator I was not able to run it on my Windows 10 machine. Fortunately, I managed to contact someone who kept an old laptop with MacOS Mojave, specifically for the purpose of running old 32-bit apps. This good samaritan was able to open 6 out of 7 files, with the mysterious 7th movement lost forever to data degradation.

Encore’s life cycle is typical for software development. An innovative new app is developed to fill a need; updates are released periodically to add new features, address bugs and keep it compatible with evolving computer hardware and operating systems; eventually it is out-competed by newer and more effective technologies; customer enthusiasm wanes and incentives are no longer in place to continue maintaining it; successive OS updates render it obsolete to all but the most dedicated vintage computer nerds.

The software life cycle, compared with the entire history of music, is terrifyingly fast. Finale, the backbone of the musical theatre industry, still used by hundreds of thousands of composers around the world, only lived about as long as Mozart.

Please enjoy this brief, abridged history of music publishing. This is how my grief manifests itself.

This is something the music industry will have to reckon with going forward. Finale is just the first widely entrenched piece of music software to fall, but there is no reason to believe Sibelius, Dorico, or even open-source MuseScore are immune from this in the long run. Even though I correctly predicted that Finale was on its way out, I never could have imagined that the entire .mus/.musx file format would become deprecated so soon. The only way we can preserve the music of the digital age is through the active upkeep of files by composers, publishers and archivists.

What Comes After the Finale

I may be an optimist, but I am not naïve. This wasn’t a reckless decision made by incompetent upper management, and it’s not a hostile takeover planned by a shady cabal over at Yamaha/Steinberg. The reality is much more banal; this is just the mechanisms of capitalism at work. MakeMusic and Steinberg came to an agreement that reflected the reality of the situation and would benefit both of them, and I doubt any petition or lawsuit (well-meaning as they are) will have any impact on the outcome. I also highly doubt that Finale or the .mus/.musx file format will be made open-source. I’ll again point you to Philip Rothman’s excellent article on the topic, since he digs into the specifics of the business side of things.

When the dust settles from this monumental announcement, the public discourse should turn towards next steps.

As it stands, Finale’s licensing agent will be shut down on August 25, 2025. For Mac users, the deadline is potentially as soon as whenever macOS Sequoia is launched, since Finale has a history of breaking with each successive MacOS update.

I am recommending to all my clients the same steps that I am taking:

1. Ensure that you have a PDF copy of the scores and parts for all of your completed projects. If playback is an important component, make sure you have those audio files too. While you’re at it, make sure you make a redundant backup on a cloud service. I can personally vouch for Backblaze (yes that’s an affiliate link with a special perks for both me and you if you sign up!).
2. Export all of your existing Finale files to MusicXML. Work smarter, not harder! You can do this in batches using Finale’s “Translate Folder to MusicXML…” function.
   
   I simply ran a search on my laptop for all .mus and .musx files (there were 1932 of them) and copied all of them into a single folder. My Finale is mass-translating them in batches of 50 as I type this article.
3. If you have any ongoing projects in Finale, now is the time to strategize. If you’re neck-deep and deadlines are looming, finish up any projects in Finale before you change course. If you’re near the beginning of a project and have some breathing room, now may be the perfect “trial by fire” conditions to learn a new notation software.
4. Lastly (and lowest priority), if you’ve been putting off fixing errata in your old scores, you now have a hard deadline on the horizon. It’s time to sit down and itemise those tasks.

MusicXML is a lossy format, but it is the best interchange format for sheet music right now. It doesn’t capture most page layout data, so any changes or edits to your music in the future will be quite involved, requiring you to re-engrave the piece. This is unfortunate, but it’s not catastrophic.

Many (perhaps most) creatives struggle with “finishing” a project. As long as that Finale file is there, so is the possibility of revising it, fixing it, or remixing it. The post-Finale world is one where hundreds of thousands of pieces of music are “frozen in amber” - the composer can no longer meddle with them, and thus performers must take a new degree of ownership over them. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

 
Look, we’re all been there.

Publishing houses and music libraries already work within the limitations of SVG graphics and raster images. An enormous slice of sheet music publications to this day are essentially high-resolution scans of music printed from engraved plates and cleaned up in Photoshop. The most skilled music librarians can create whole new parts just by piecing together staves in Photoshop, no notation software required. I even spoke to a publishing colleague who keeps a paper “master copy” of all his works in a carefully sorted fire-proof vault, and simply Xeroxes a copy every time someone makes a purchase.

That last example certainly has its drawbacks (it’s not coffee spill-proof, for instance), but you have to admit; it’s exceptionally resilient against software obsolescence. Even when the PDF standard is abandoned (don’t worry, that’s still decades away at least), his music will still exist in its original form, frozen in amber.

The Obligatory Plug

If you’re a musician, I urge you to take a close look at that “brief, abridged history of music publishing” chart earlier if you haven’t already. I spent longer creating it than I did writing this article (oops), and I was seeking to make a point. The reason we know about ancient Babylonian music carved into cuneiform tablets and early music notation in the ancient Greek alphabet is because some humans understood their cultural value and put substantial effort into preserving them. Finale’s lifespan is just one small blip in the vast history of written music, but it played an enormous role in democratising its creation and publication.

This next year will be a painful period of adjustment. Broadway composers and copy houses will be hit hardest, since Finale has held a majority of their market share for decades. The announcement is poor timing for educators, particularly in the United States, where the 2024-2025 academic year is already in full swing.

If you’re looking for assistance to ease the transition, there are many smaller music engraving operations (like us!) that are specialised in this topic and poised to lend a hand. Whether you’re looking to re-train on a new music notation software, convert some or all of your catalogue, or just need advice on how to proceed on a sensitive ongoing project, I recommend you reach out to any one of them (including us!).

 

NOTE: Mere minutes before I hit "publish," MakeMusic sent out an update stating that "Finale authorization will remain available indefinitely." This is great news, but it doesn't change my overall point about software obsolescence. This only delays the inevitable; Finale will still become increasingly obsolete over time as computer hardware and OS technologies progress.