It’s the full sentence and its distinction that has me confused.
Were there any left??
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This is speculation, but acquiring the code to make such a conversion possible would be huge from a strategic point of view. Maybe impossible or impractical, obviously I have no idea.
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Seems like it would be a very big deal for thousands of users if Steinberg used that source code to develop a tool to migrate Finale files to Dorico.
I imagine the MakeMusic Cloud is somehow a very important part of this deal, and it makes all the sense in the world for Steinberg to make the transition as smooth as possible.
EDIT: to put it another way, how likely is it that the entire transaction between MakeMusic and Steinberg is only the Finale’s brand endorsement of Dorico combined with Steinberg’s cross-grade price promotion? Not very likely, IMHO.
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My tools of the trade in the ‘90s: Finale, Vision, Galaxy, Sound Designer, BIAS Peak, and Max. As of today, Max is the only thing on that list still thriving. And as an aside, it was easy to sync Finale to Studio Vision Pro, way back then.
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I know. Got Finale in 1989…switched to Dorico in 2016. Knew Finale wasn’t sustainable even then.
Hang in there on the XML conversions. Took me the better part of a year, but I finally got it done. We may need to start a moral support group just for that! 
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Why isn’t it likely? It requirey very little commitment by both parties: MakeMusic can redirect its customers to soften the blow, and Steinberg invests in some cheaper upgrades to even more widen its base by A LOT.
Why go any further?
[quote=“HeiPet, post:19, topic:929549, full:true”]
Perhaps Steinberg wants to hire some developers from Finale now to enlagre the small Dorico team. [/quote]
Finale and developers - an oxymoron
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There are all kinds of font issues with some of my older Finale files too. They changed the naming structure with Maestro Wide sometime in the mid 2000s (at least on PC) meaning any files that had previously used that font had to be manually updated. I was also a big fan of Adobe Multiple Master fonts in the early 2000s, so none of those files open correctly either once that tech was killed off. In any case, this is going to be a huge headache. Lots of my older files will need manual font editing before exporting PDFs, if I didn’t already create them. It’s not as simple as just batch converting XML‘s and PDFs. Ugh!
I think the prospect of any ‘tool’ to convert Finale files to Dorico – other than the one we already have – is very unlikely.
The programs are too different in their design.
I think all of us who have already jumped ship need to be on standby to help an influx of Finale users.
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This is speculation, of course, but a converter for Finale files means keeping the guts of Finale going.
MakeMusic have clearly not committed to keeping Finale going - in fact they appear to have committed to the opposite - and I can’t imagine that there’s any commercial gain for Steinberg in incorporating bits of antiquated Finale code into Dorico.
If it were a hypothetical case of trying to attract Finale customers to Dorico while Finale is still being developed, I can see that Dorico being able to open Finale files might make Dorico more attractive than, say, Sibelius or MuseScore. We’re not in that position, though: Finale customers have been given the choice of trying to eek as much life out of existing computers as possible over the next 12 months (or buying spares, or experimenting with virtual machines), buying Dorico for cheap or going somewhere else for full price/usual crossgrade price.
I can’t see Steinberg throwing development resources at a specific Finale thingy, even if they did have access to Finale source code, which as far as I can tell they don’t.
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One day the New Grove will note that thousands of composers worldwide showed a remarkably simultaneous break from their older compositional practices during a one-year period from Aug 2024–Aug 2025. Musicologists will be baffled…
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I agree. The reason Finale’s discontinued is because its code is full of old dirt. Why would Steinberg invest in this and try to keep it alive? I don’t think there’s anything more in for Steinberg, except for a happy endorsement and a lot of work to flash the new customers with a shiny D6, fresh, modern, and with no decades old codes for miles.
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Well, I know what I’m doing this week…
opening Finale for the last time, checking to make sure I have PDF files of all my work, then deleting all three instances of Finale on my computer.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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The announcement talks of “creating a pathway for Finale users to crossgrade…”
I would not be surprised if that partnership included a Finale to Dorico file converter.
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Remember, too, that Daniel is co-chair of the Music Notation Community Group, which is always working on the next version of MusicXML and other formats. I’m sure they have things in mind which we will not hear about until they are implemented and available.
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You don’t need all the old dirt, what you need for such a converter is the file format and code that knows about the meaning of the bits and bytes in the structure. This can then be transferred into Dorico structures.
All the code for display, formatting, etc. is not needed. But even this sounds pretty simple, it is a massive task to get it correctly from the right to the left.
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A cheap price makes export - import neither easy nor error-free
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MakeMusic website still says that Finale is fully integrated into their Cloud, which also includes educator resources, catalogs, etc. I would find it very strange if Make Music pulled the plug on Finale without making any plans to fill that massive hole.
Secondly, MakeMusic website has an entire section for MusicXML with plugins specifically for Sibelius and Finale. A XML based conversion tool might not require the source code, but I’m just speculating.
But in order for Dorico to cast off a Finale file the same way that Finale does, Dorico would need to know how Finale would cast off the file, and it would need to be able to completely ignore all of its usual collision avoidance stuff, seeing as Finale doesn’t really do collision avoidance, and it would need to be able to handle things like staff styles where things are displayed differently in the score to the parts (in different ways to the ways it already can), and it would need to be able to handle e.g. multiple concurrent sets of system object position stuff for text styles, with differing rules as to which staves would get those text objects, and, and, and
(This is all off the cuff, from a beach in southern Portugal.)
It’s a pipe dream. MusicXML will do at least as good a job, without any additional development cost on either side.
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