Steinberg has shared a quick “switcher” tutorial for Finale users getting started with Dorico. Plus, here’s some general advice for switchers—especially for composers who are now worried they’ll lose access to their work.
Music engraver and publisher Ben Byram-Wigfield explains MusicXML import, and does it in a lovely British accent. (Yeah, in case you haven’t read me talking about this before, the former Sibelius team now works on Dorico for Steinberg.)
This goes through some details of how Dorico handles notation options differently than Finale. That includes secondary beam splitting, tie placement and appearance, spacing, how text interacts with margins (Dorico doesn’t allow text placement in margins as Finale does), creating proper dynamic instructions from generic text expressions, and flow options. It does work really well, though, for most scores:
There are more tutorials below. (They even have German-language versions.)
But maybe now it’s important to pause, and consider the concerns of current Finale users. I know it’s a big deal to lose access to the platform on which you’ve based entire careers as composers, arrangers, educators, and other music professionals. It hits on a personal level. Even though many had suspected this day might come soon, it’s a blow. (Seth Cluett has written something similar, with similar advice to mine.)
The reason I’m not so pessimistic – apart from having already departed my Finale days nearly 30 years ago – is that I think there are some strategies both for maintaining your past work and migrating to a new tool. And I’ve seen lots of users who were happier switching to currently available tools. Let’s go over some advice to make that work.
Finale uses a proprietary file format, so the first major concern is retaining access to scores in their original form. Here’s some general advice:
Do export MusicXML. I’m going to defend MusicXML and say that, at this point, issues are fairly minimal (once you make adjustments like the ones in the video above). But you’ll want to take all your Finale projects and export the latest versions to MusicXML if you haven’t. (It’s a good excuse for a backup if you haven’t done one lately!)
Download the latest version of Finale now, and store the installer somewhere safe. You’ll first want the latest version of Finale, or at least the last version of Finale you used for scores. Downloads will remain available for the time being – see below. Those are currently compatible with the latest operating systems and architectures for Windows and macOS.
Find a machine on which you can permanently run an activated Finale license. This could be a physical machine or a used computer (you might be able to salvage one easily). I even think we’ll start to use emulation more for backward compatibility – I’ve been playing with the superb UTM for macOS, which easily runs vintage OSes and Windows and Linux on a modern Apple Silicon Mac.
Do go ahead and activate that license. See this note from MakeMusic today:
- Finale development has ended, but you can still download your previously purchased Finale versions from your eStore account. If your computer crashes or you need to install Finale on a new device, you’re not left without options.
- We are committed to keeping the authorization process functional for a year. We’ve heard your concerns and are actively exploring ways to extend flexibility in the weeks ahead.
- We understand that learning Dorico will be a steep learning curve, as it is with any complex notation or professional software. Both our team and Steinberg have developed extensive onboarding videos to guide you through the transition.
Hope for some better solutions from MakeMusic. I’ll reiterate: I think MakeMusic should find a way to remove activation. The product is unsupported and discontinued; there’s no reason it should still have an activation apparatus once those servers shut down.
Luke DuBois, an engineer for Cycling ’74 and instructor at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center, has been discussing another option. As posted on his Facebook page:
I’m sure this has occurred to multiple people, but if I were still writing music using notation software I would get a pressure campaign going to compel MakeMusic to publish the Finale .musx file format spec with a permissive license so that folks could develop open source tools to translate it to other formats as they evolve, other commercial notation packages could build in support for reading it, and there is an avenue left open for reading these files beyond the 12-month grace period that, it seems, the software will still run and be supported. “Convert to MusicXML and cross your fingers” is not IMO a proactive strategy from a media archivability perspective.
A useful parallel story a bit more from my world would be Adobe’s failure / refusal to publish the FLA / SWF (“Shockwave / Flash”) file specifications with a permissive license; this has resulted in two decades of early media and internet art being put at risk of vanishing, with a few intrepid souls maintaining working hardware from that era, and a few other intrepid souls working on an open source emulator that would have been developed in 1/100th of the time had Adobe shown good citizenship here.
A better story to consider here would be that of word processing software in the 90s, where the various file formats – regardless of whether they’re used by commercial software – were freely licensed to competitors, allowing e.g. MS Word to open WordPerfect documents at a high compatibility level, and vice verse. File format specifications for these documents are published in the Library of Congress for preservation, e.g. WordStar’s spec here:
WordStar File Format Family [United States Library of Congress]
It would seem that MakeMusic could easily make that move now and make everyone who seems very upset today a little less worried.
More tutorials on switching to Dorico, which I think do illustrate why this is the best choice for most users (even with free alternatives like MuseScore). The note input video makes me smile a bit, because of fond memories impressing ex-Finale users with input in Sibelius about 20 years ago.
And look, final note – sometimes switching can work out well. Ask Ellen.