Finale’s Finale

The End of an Era and What It Means to Music Geeks

A bomb dropped on the music industry yesterday when it was announced that the venerated music notation program, Finale, the software users loved to hate, would cease to offer any further updates or support from its makers after August 2025. After 30+ years of being an industry stalwart, from its infancy to its most recent Version 27 (I think), Finale would cease to be.  As if to make sure its thousands upon thousands of users truly understood there was no coming back for Finale, the president of the company sent every registered user an email announcing the news, along with a recommendation that they transition their music notation needs to the relative newcomer, Dorico. To appreciate the impact of this announcement, it’s roughly the equivalent of Microsoft announcing they are abandoning Word or Excel and recommending its users to go to an Apple product.

My own relationship with Finale is spotty. I purchased a copy in the very early days, back in 1988.  The software marketing made it look like the Holy Grail for composers: the ultimate music notation tool.  As a commercial composer paying out significant sums to music copyists, I saw the opportunity to save money. If I put my jingle and film scores in the computer, it would print the parts, and I wouldn’t have to pay copyists.  Ergo, the software would pay for itself in no time. And let me add – the Finale software in 1988 was expensive. Very expensive.  I paid a little under $1000 for Finale (in 1988!), with dreams of printing parts in no time on my dot matrix printer from my Mac SE. (Stop laughing.)

Those dreams shattered like a plate glass window hit by a drunk cowboy behind the wheel of his Ford F-150. 

As a test run, I entered a simple, brief string quartet into the program. It took my computer nearly 24 hours to render the parts. Mind you, the Mac SE, a mere tinker toy by today’s standards, was about as fast a machine as was available at the time. So, before I ever even registered the software, I sold it to a friend, who was far more eager to tackle the complexities of Finale.  To his credit, that friend became a true Finale power-user in the ensuing years.  I went back to hand-written scores, and paying copyists for the next 20 years, or so.

By the mid-1990s, computers had gotten fast enough to handle Finale more deftly. It was still a clunky, unintuitive program, in my opinion. But it was faster. Finale had evolved to be suitable for typesetting and preparing finished studio parts. Print music publishers began transitioning from music typewriters and old-school music engraving to embrace Finale. Some composer/arranger friends started to work directly at the computer with Finale, eschewing the world of pencils & paper. Finale’s marketers began to imply the software was a source of creativity for the composer.  I disagreed with that description then, and I still do.  Like all such software, Finale is a notation tool, much the same as the pencil, only easier to read. 

During that time, I remained a pencil & paper writer because I could work faster that way.  What’s more,  copyists that handled my scores told me they could typeset my work more quickly than they could correct the scores submitted to them on Finale. Also, during most of that time, I was signed exclusively to Word Music, and Word paid my copying bills. So, there was no pressure for me to adapt to any notation software.

I chose Sibelius.

A lot of Finale users might be surprised to learn that that Sibelius has more users worldwide than Finale. It’s also worth noting that in the mid-2000s, Sibelius employed a team of developers that worked very hard to modernize the program, rebuilding it significantly.  Next to Finale, Sibelius seemed elegant and simple, while Finale seemed to struggle under the weight of its millions of lines of 30 year-old code. But then —  Sibelius goofed. Or, should I say, its parent company, Avid, goofed. The leadership at Avid apparently thought Sibelius was just fine the way it was, and they didn’t need all those creative programmers any longer, so in 2012, they fired almost the entire team. 

Hubris meet nemesis.

With an entire group of experienced notation software creators freely afloat in the marketplace, another competitor (a huuuge competitor by the way) saw an opportunity.  Steinberg (a division of Yamaha) hired the former Sibelius team to build a new notation program from the ground up.  Intimately familiar with the pitfalls of both Finale and Sibelius, the team set out to create a program that would surpass both the big giants in the industry. The result was Dorico, now in its 5th version, fully mature, and poised to become the dominant notation software of the next generation.  This is the software the president of Finale has recommended to its users is yesterday’s farewell email.

So – what are the take-aways here?  What does yesterday’s news from Finale mean to those of us who use these programs daily – the composers, arrangers, typesetters, publishers, studio copyists? There are literally millions of Finale files in existence, which in a year from now, will no longer be supported.  Some of those files are for classic pieces of music that really must be archived properly. What will become of them? What will publishers do? What will my friends who have spent the last decades becoming experts on Finale do to shift gears to another software program? (Is there anything more tedious?)

First – and I don’t mean to sound harsh – but to those Finale users who were stunned by the news, if we look at it with clear eyes, we shouldn’t be surprised. Finale’s demise was inevitable.  The software had not kept up with the competition. Any attempt to catch up would have required an overhaul of the program from its very foundations.  I’m guessing that just wasn’t worth the expense, and Steinberg made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.  

Second – Perhaps this can be a re-set point for a lot of us, both creatively and as an industry. Personally, I always bristled at the implied expectation that all composers were expected to submit their work to publishers in Finale.  Let me be clear: that has never been the case for me.  I’ve submitted files in Sibelius and never had any problems with the publishers I’ve worked with. But I know a lot of newbie writers thought that Finale – a heavy, deep, difficult to master program – was their only option.  (That’s like taking trigonometry as your first ever math class.)  Creative people do not all think alike, or work equally well with the same tools.  Composers and arrangers should feel free to choose whatever works best for us, whether it be Dorico, Sibelius, MuseScore, StaffPad, or pencil & paper.  

Now here’s me trying to find a silver lining in the Finale users cloud: I know it’s going to be a hassle, and a pain in the neck, but maybe a switch in software can be a creative jolt in your thinking, like trying out a new tool in the toolbox. Yeah — go ahead and hate me for that.  But – I predict a year from now, there will be tens of thousands of former Finale users gleefully happy with Dorico, or Sibelius, or MuseScore.

As for publishing houses, I realize every print publisher will have a preferred platform from which they edit their work. But it’s no great burden to own a current copy of the various notation programs, if only to be able to open a file and play through it.  I bought Finale just so I could read students’ files and export them as XMLs.  And I will certainly take advantage of the Dorico offer to Finale users – just in case I ever need it.  It shouldn’t be a big deal which software a composer submits her work in.  

Third – This could be a real business opportunity for some enterprising geek to offer file conversion services: Finale to XML; Finale to Dorico or Sibelius, etc.  (Finale to XML is probably the safest, most universal conversion.)  Add in a detailed database of the catalog’s titles, product numbers, and scanned PDFs of the originals – and you do a land office business for a few years.  All you’d need is  a Mac with all the current notation software, and don’t ever take it to a new OS.

My guess is that this won’t be the last such big change for our industry.  If Sibelius fails to rise to Dorico’s competitive challenge, it could be the next to fall. Also, I’ve heard that MuseScore has big plans to become professionally competitive with Sibelius and Dorico. What’s more, they have the deep pockets and the drive to do so, and their association with Hal Leonard is a big incentive. Change is the nature of hi-tech businesses. When you think about it, it’s remarkable that Finale remained a dominant player for as long as it did.  

So back up your work. We should all probably be saving everything we write as XML files!