I was reluctantly “forced” to switch to Dorico when Finale was discontinued, after more than 25 years of using it. My first copy of Finale came on a 3.5” floppy disk (I was using Encore before that). I’ve worked as a copyist since graduating from music school in 2003 and have a few published books under my belt, all created with Finale. My scores looked beautiful—I had mastered Finale, pushing it to its limits.
Then came the inevitable switch to Dorico, which I put off for as long as possible. Being a software developer, I even wrote a tool to mass-convert my thousands of scores into MusicXML. But now, with a show coming up next month and an hour of music to arrange for string quintet, I had no choice. I finally installed the Dorico crossgrade and my brain is on the verge of exploding.
I deeply regret not switching to Dorico the day it launched. I can do everything I did in Finale but without the black magic. After watching about an hour of tutorials on the official YouTube channel, I already finished one of the arrangements in half the time it would’ve taken me in Finale.
I was so comfortable with Finale, so fluent in its quirks and tricks, that I didn’t feel a strong reason to change. What I didn’t realize is that there shouldn’t be quirks or tricks. There should just be a well-designed UI. After just a few hours with Dorico, I saw it clearly: Finale wasn’t built by people making music. It was built by people making software, stuck in the past.
I think the best thing in Dorico’s philosophy is that for most of the things I’ve seen so far, you can change your mind later. This is absolutely spectacular in terms of onboarding new users because it allows you to dig in and touch everything without the risk of permanent damage. This allows you to learn the software just by paying the price of your time, not of a borked file or settings. I can’t tell you how many things I did in Finale that actually corrupted the files I was working on.
Just finished (I think) my sixth work in Dorico since switching from Finale in August after the announcement that Finale, which I used for three decades, was past circling the drain. Really wish I had switched earlier, but this is fine. I think I got my money’s worth out of Finale LOL.
That is an awesome endorsement! I switched from Sibelius 5 years ago and learned it during the pandemic. I had time LOL! It took me a good 6 to 9 months to really get comfortable with it. I really studied the popovers, built my keyboard shortcuts and learned the Dorico way. Much less futzing with output unlike Sibelius. Fast forward 5 years later and Dorico 6 is a dream. Being able to change prefs and options in the Jump bar is a game changer. I was always look gin for that option, first in Engraving Options, then Layout Options, then Notation Options, whew! Then buried under an Advanced button. But now the Jump bar has it all - find and switch. And don’t get me wrong: I love all the options and prefs! Talk about customization. Anyway, I am finding Dorico 6 super smooth and dare I say…snappy?
After about a year of me screaming at my computer because Finale was driving me nuts, my late wife said she would leave me if I kept trying to use Finale. So I switched to Sibelius and became sane again.
Fell in love (not literally) with Daniel and switched to Dorico when Avid forced him out at S. Landed happily and never thought about going back to either F or S.
What astounds me about your post is that you say you used Finale for 25 years. ?!?!?!? How in the heck did you survive?
There were ways to come to terms with Finale, especially if one knew the program well enough to devise work-arounds. If one started with Finale in its early years, for many it was the only (viable) game in town.
I am completely with you and your story – except that I managed to postpone the switch. So thank you for giving this injection to the confidence and great expectations for the future. I look forward!
It’s great to have some positive experiences here; not just problems and befuddlement. (I agree that you ‘sold me the dummy’ with your title and opening. )
I’m lucky that I switched to Dorico before The Event™, and was able to do so at a speed of my choice, without feeling pushed into it.
Hopefully, many of those who initially felt ‘forced’ into the move will feel that their new home is actually an improvement!
I suppose “get em’ while they’re young” applied here. I was using Encore and a friend said, “try this, you can do so much more!”. And it was true that you could do more. I got into Berklee and Finale was already the de-facto standard there. Everyone around me was either working in high-profile projects (or wanting to!), and not using Finale was inconceivable at the time. It was my proficiency in the software that earned me a student gig as a copyist. Everything kind of snowballed into me not questioning my use of Finale at all.
Exactly.
I’m now doing the second arrangement with Dorico and I’m finding that I run into all sorts of happy accidents, particularly with selections where I intuitively do something that I don’t know if it will work, and it does! Maybe this is just because my brain is mostly in tune with how the software is supposed to work, and I’m lucky that way.
The one thing I’m really struggling with is note input. I was extremely fast with Finale in this regard and my muscle memory refuses to cooperate here. In Finale I could enter everything with my right hand on the piano and the left on the numerical keys; no need for changing my hand position to reach the arrow keys or the mouse. I find that I can’t do that anymore, especially when entering rests which seems to be an anti-pattern in Dorico. In Finale, with MIDI input enabled, pressing a number key would add a note or a rest depending on whether you were pressing a piano key or not. So, I find myself taking forever to input simple lines such as these (9/8):
And when I say “forever” I’m obviously exaggerating, but having to move my hand around in the keyboard is something I’m not used to and is slowing me down until I figure out my own optimized way of navigating Dorico. I don’t look at the keyboard when I type but if I’m one-handing it like when inputing notes, I have to look, and this is the part that’s slowing me down. I used to take piano lessons from a concert pianist. Every time he would catch me looking at the piano keys while sight reading a piece of music, he’d jokingly say “never look at the battlefield!”
I’ve been using Finale since 1989.. version 1. I recently installed Dorico and learned that I can pretty much do the same things in Dorico. But I have gone back to Finale because I like the way they do it better. One of the problems that the Finale developers have had for some time is that it could already do most things people needed, and so there wasn’t much reason to upgrade. So, I’m not surprised by their business decision. I will keep a dedicated machine that will run Finale for years to come. Many Finale users feel betrayed by the deal made with Dorico. Sorry, but no Dorico for me.
Yes, I think this was quite neat in Finale, I also was a bit quicker with Speedy Entry and a MIDI keyboard. Depending on how consistent your music is based on 16th, you could change the rhythmic grid and use the arrow keys to advance one or more 16ths.
Thanks for your comments. I’m sticking with Finale for now. I haven’t found anything better. Finale may require more time to learn. But I’m not looking for something simple to learned. It always seems that simple programs to learn also give you less control. I am also aware of many people who are successfully using Finale in Sequoia. Last fall we were told it was the end of Finale. That wasn’t true. It isn’t broken. It still works. And if it already does everything you need, then nothing has changed.
If you aren’t afraid to put some effort into learning for the sake of more functionality and control, I would suggest that Dorico would be a great option for you!
Of course, it’s fine if you choose to stick with Finale for a while longer, but my experience has been along the same lines as @m_ravel’s, and I hope with time you’ll discover the joy of Dorico too.
The thing that has changed is that they are probably unlikely to keep the activation server running forever even though they said they would “indefinitely”. I would be very surprised if the activation server is still running in 5 years time. At that point, if your computer died and you needed to get a new one (or a new “old” one that could run the old OS that was compatible), you would have a problem if you wanted to activate. That could force you to migrate to another program, and the complexity of that would be compounded by the fact that you continued to make new Finale files long after the end was announced, giving you even more work to migrate old scores than if you had migrated sooner.
I don’t really care if you you go to Dorico or not, but choosing to stay with Finale long term is not safe.
I spoke to someone at Make Music about the activation server. They have other products that they are continuing to develop and support. The company is not shutting down, and their website is continuing. Plus, I have not yet heard of any problems reported while using the latest version of Finale in Sequoia… although Make Music didn’t do their own testing, so they cannot officially state it is compatible.
Why would I worry about Finale working 5 years from now, when I have another older iMac that has Finale 2014 running it. That was 11 years ago. And it still does everything I need. It still works with my MIDI system. It still prints. It still exports PDFs, etc. It still runs that sound libraries I installed back then. ( in fact, it runs some great Roland sample libraries that don’t run anymore on the current MAC OS. ). I really don’t see what is “not safe”.
)
