The Finale of Finale

It’s August 27, 2025, the end of support for the venerable Finale notation software. It’s a little bittersweet for me, as I started with Finale back in highschool (yes, last century…), and kept using it until October 19, 2016 when Dorico 1.0 was released. In it’s heyday (which I’d say was 2004-2010, and conveniently corresponds to when I was in grad school), it was great!

But it’s also a case study in Cory Doctrow’s concept of enshitification and corporations making questionable decisions.

In the seventeen years that I used Finale, I wrote approximately 285 separate scores, not counting different drafts/backups/quick demos for students. These range from simple exerciese for a violin or mandolin student, to larger works for instruments and piano, to works for instruments and electronics, to my doctoral dissertation (Erebus for Saxophone Quartet and Computer). For most things, Finale was able to handle most tasks witout major issues… other than the constant fighting of alignment of dynamics/performance text/bowing/slurs/etc. But as I started writing more and more notationally difficult music (e.g. using quarter tones in sax multiphonics, cutaway scores, lots of graphics, custom noteheads, Xenakis-style glissandi), it became a pain in the neck to work in Finale.

Seriously, it takes approximately 14 mouse clicks through a bunch of menus to add a single freaking quarter tone. When I’m writing wind multiphonics, that’s something that I need nearly constantly, and frankly don’t have the time to waste doing every single time. And yes, there are paid plugins that will mitigate this, but I was a broke grad student, and wasn’t willing to pay $100 for a plugin on top of the $100/year for the latest update so I could maintain file compatibility with whatever students were using.

Not great, but it got worse.

As computers got more powerful and the switch to the x64 architecture was happening, Finale was hampered with legacy 32-bit (and even 16-bit) code. They attempted a 64-bit rewrite, but it actually made the program less stable (and Finale was notoriously unstable in the best of times), with kludgy workarounds to avoid rewriting legacy code.

This was made even worse with attempts to “DAW-ify” the interface when Finale was sold from Coda to MakeMusic. Including things like Garritan Personal Orchestra was a nice bonus (at first), but never had the full support for instruments and playing techniques of a standard orchestra… unless you wanted to buy the full version… and was, of course prone to crashes and memory exceptions, frequently taking my entire computer down. I suppose some music educators liked the ability to output SmartMusic files, but as a composer, that was never really something that I was going to use. I just wanted them to fix broken things and make it less crash-prone.

But they didn’t.

Instead, they added features like having an audio track in your notation software (I still have no idea why this was done), adding scoring to video – then remving the feature, adding templates for different instrument groups (wow…. I couldn’t do that myself…), more SmartMusic integration, and generally charging $100/year for changes that broke the file format for previous version.

It all came to a head for me in 2014 when I was at the CMS National Conference, and had a chance to talk to the developers. I asked them if they werre going to fix any of the bugs that had been there foor years (layout in score versus parts, placement and alignment, the quarter tone entry issue, constant crashes due to legacy code that required workarounds for modern CPUs, etc.). They’re response?

“We’re not focused on that, but we’re including Boom Whacker samples in the new version of Garritan Personal Orchestra!”

I don’t fucking care… I will literally never use those…

“We’re partnering with Alfred Music to bring their piano exercises to Finale format.”

Not a pianist, don’t care.

“We’re making it easier to make SmartMusic exercises.”

Again, don’t care. Are you going to fix the bug???

“No….”

That was the end for me. Dorico was already on the horizon, and MuseScore, while near-teminally unstable, was available. I bided my time in Finale 2014 until Dorico 1.0 was released, grabbed the crossgrade license, and haven’t opened Finale since. Watching them lose market share, try the latest trends in educational software (and fail), and not fix bugs was bittersweet, but not unexpected due to MakeMusic’s focus on the K-12 educational market. Meanwhile I could easily do all the stuff I wanted for transcribing Arabic/Turkish/Indian classical music with all of the microtones in MuseScore or Dorico (which even plays them back correctly!), create custom key signatures for Klezmer transcriptions, do all sorts of custom staves for Medieval/Renaissance music typesetting, and go completely nuts with graphical insertion for my own pieces for XYZ and computer.

Simply put, it was like coming out of an abusive relationship and realizing how shitty it was in retrospect.

And as a college professor, I was only too happy to help my students get out of that relationship as well. While I was at Oakland University (Go Grizzlies!) we switched out lab from Finale to Dorico, and now at Montana State (Go Cats, Go!) we’ve done the same. And students have responded to it really well. Probably because things don’t constantly crash, and you don’t have to dive through dozens of menus to do some tasks. And unlike MuseScore, Dorico autoupdates score order to the proper orchestral layout (no euphonium below the strings), doesn’t have questionable instrument notes (e.g. French Horn used to be defaulted to “Double Horn in F” and had to be manually edited), has great part extraction, and actually plays back microtonal intervals (which is a surprisingly big thing for a number of students). It’s been a learnign curve for some, but they’re always happy wiht the results and how little layout editing they need to do.

Unlike Finale, which was always a huge hassle for them to master. Times change, software changes, nothing lasts forever, and we have to move on.

So, here’s to Finale. But it’s time to move on. Let the dead bury their dead.

For way more on Finale’s foibles, check out Tantacrul’s excellent video below: