Finale Day

The music composition world (which I am barely even an honorary member of anymore) is up in arms about sudden end of Finale, the music software which I used to craft all of my MIDI recordings and scores during my music career. The president of the software company posted this letter on Monday:

I appreciate the challenge of monetizing and improving 40 years worth of code and the honest introspection it took to pull the plug. I also get how disruptive this change is to people actively using Finale in their daily careers. Hopefully, the company will add more off-ramps based on the uproar (more ways to convert file formats, longer time before shutting off the authorization server, and maybe executables that no longer have a "phone home" requirement).

Update: In the span of just 3 days, the company has already agreed to host the authorization server for the forseeable future instead of just 1 year, and plans to bundle the latest version of Finale (v27) with cross-upgrade to another company's software, Dorico.

I started using Finale in tenth grade (May 1994), when my dad purchased it and a dedicated MIDI Interface card that used up one of the valuable expansion slots in our Pentium family computer. I spent that summer inputting existing scores (such as Shostakovich's Festive Overture) so I could hear them played back as tinny MIDI, and then used Finale in my junior year to arrange really bad pep band charts. By my senior year, I was composing original music and ended up using Finale on a daily basis through grad school and even a little more afterwards.

Finale was never a great piece of software, but it could definitely do everything you needed and a bunch of stuff you didn't. The music notation software hewed too close to how computer people think about music and not how composers did. I recall sending tons of feedback over the years (always acknowledged but never implemented) on ways to make things more intuitive. For example, adding an accelerando to a score required the composer to type in a bunch of numbers representing the tempos and then defining the rate of change across the period of time using a shape designer. Having a preset like "go steadily from 80 beats per minute to 120 beats per minute over 4 beats" would have made so much more sense to anyone not thinking like a computer.

I'm currently trying to get my last purchased version of Finale (v25.5) working in Windows 11, after which I'll convert all my files to an interim format, MusicXML, that should be transferable to another software choice. I probably won't learn a new scoring tool any time soon, given my recently posted idea to go in a different direction:

I have also felt the itch to get back into music composition, but from the perspective of the final product being a recording of exactly what I want to express (read: Cubase) rather than a printed score that real musicians will never be able to recreate as well as I can in my brain (read: Finale). This would require a whole 'nother skillset that I've never explored before.