Assuming youâre talking US dollars, the crossgrade price for Dorico from Sibelius is $299.99, which is roughly what itâs always been (excepting occasional sale periods).
The price for people with Finale licenses has been dropped to $150, which presumably serves both as a helping hand to bereft Finale migrants, but also incentivises Finale migrants not to move to other competitors.
As far as loyalty discounts are concerned for people whoâve bought lots of Steinberg products, that doesnât seem to be a thing. Itâs not like Dorico does the same thing as Cubase/Nuendo/Wavelab, so there isnât a crossgrade to pull you away from somewhere else.
Finale users donât have unused instruments, because there arenât multiple instruments attached to players that carry through the whole score. Thereâs just the staves, and users can create instrument changes that change the kind of instrument. The immediate advantage to that approach is that simple switches back and forth can be handled a touch easier. But it limits the kind of clever things you can do in more complex situations, like having the player quickly have two instruments theyâre playing together, or having an alternate transposition available for players who may not be able to switch, etc. Playback may also be easier to manage in Dorico?
This seems to be a new page with information for us:
I probably shouldnât dignify this fatuous post with a response but feel compelled to point out that the brand Walther is well established. Most people are familiar with it from James Bondâs pistol of choice, the Walther PPK.
I notice there used to be a minor Swedish manufacturer called Walter Microphones.
Used it on the Atari ST/TT/Falcon platform for many years. It still works on modern machines with TOS/GEM Emulators.
Not sure about the Amiga Ecosystem, but for AtariâŚ
Tiger Cub was a bolt on piano roll style MIDI Editor for the larger KCS Omega suite (it could also run as a stand alone MIDI sequencer/editor).
The Notation product from the Dr. T KCS Omega suite was called Copyist II.
Sysex (synth/sampler patch librarian) was handled by XoR. I forget all the âmodulesâ that worked with the KCS Omega âmultitasking mangerâ sequencing engine now, but there were several. Seems like they had a sample editor/librarian of some sort, and a bunch of other tools targeted at the film industry.
Transcribe audio. Import an audio file and adjust the tempo to match the audio file and you can playback your transcription with the audio even if it changes tempo. Miss that feature a lot in Dorico
What weâll going to experience, here at the Doricoâs haven, is unexpected and uncommon. Usually, people choose a software because want to use it. In this case, there will be thousand of people that are forced to do it, and didnât intend to do it.
Iâm already seeing people pretending Dorico to behave like Finale. But it must be clear that this is not Finale, and there are reasons why others have, in the past, decided to leave Finale and go with Dorico. Finale, as hard it is yet to believe it, is dead.
I hope this will not cause too much delay and deviations on the original plans of the Dorico team, and too much tension in the forums.
Paolo
With the latest update, mentioned by Robin in post #161 above, now it is looking even less like Finale users are being forced to use Dorico. I got another e-mail from MakeMusic 45 minutes ago (the third in two days, a nice surprise since I have not purchased a Finale upgrade since the 1990s) which I hope all Finale users will see soon.
I suggest we let the dust settle for a day or so on the future of Finale.
Iâm sorry but thatâs absurd. Muse Group is flush with cashâtons of itâand it is their stated goal to dominate the music industry.
The acquisition of Hal Leonard is a step in the right direction and is key to their goals. Dirty little not so secret: Hal Leonard Publishing makes sure that rights holders are paid and has taken over these responsibilities for Muse. So, the big copyright issues facing their download sites? Gone. They also own all of those lyrics download sites and those rights holders are paid, too.
This Scoring Notes article sets out the framework. Muse Group Acquires Hal Leonard
MuseScore will play a big part of this. Version 4 is no longer horrible (a monster improvement, IMO) but the goal is to make version 5 the de facto notation app for Hal Leonard. For that, MuseScore 5 will actually have to be good. Iâm not holding my breath but it could happen. Free is very attractive, especially to the casual user and the education market.
I confess that, when I read it, I felt like they were describing the Borg and all that was missing is, âResistance is futile. You will be assimilated.â
This was announced two hours ago. Rather than link, letâs read together:
Clarifications on the initial announcement
- Finale authorization will remain available indefinitely: Please note that future OS changes can still impact your ability to use Finale on new devices.
- Finale v27 to be included with Dorico Pro Crossgrades: We are currently working on a solution for all customers who have purchased or intend to purchase a Dorico Pro crossgrade to be able to download Finale v27. This will ensure that you can export your Finale files using MusicXML 4.0, the most robust version of MusicXML available. Thank you for your patience, we will provide more information soon.
Noticeably absent is anything from Avid. Although permanent licenses for Sibelius are available, just try and find themâno crossgrades for those if you do. Avid really, really wants everyone on Subscription.
I miss that program. It was my first notation program when I had an Amiga 500.
I would imagine that Sibelius/Avid were (almost?) as surprised by the Steinberg/MakeMusic deal as the rest of us and are taking their time to think something up. Even if theyâd made a decision within 36 hours of the news, that decision may be being reshaped by the further news that the Finale licensing system will be maintained indefinitely.
Itâll be interesting to see how todayâs commitment to licensing alters the thinking of Finale power users: I suspect a number of e.g. hollywood orchestrators were intending to keep using Finale for as long as possible, and copyist colleagues have already been muttering about licensing Finale within a virtual machine image in order to combat Finale-damaging OS updates and hardware malfunctions. Particularly in the UK, where weâre frequently schlepping laptops, laser printers and supplies to studios for anything from a morning to a few weeks, we donât have the luxury of hanging onto e.g. old tower Mac Pros, but I can certainly think of composers that have hung on to (and maintained) old gear in order to keep obsolete software runningâŚ
Iâve been using Dorico for a few years now and am much happier than I was as a Finale user. I used Finale exclusively from the early 90âs. Like many others here, I have tons of old files to convert. To be honest, if some of those things never saw the light of day again it would probably be fine, but I donât even remember much of what is in those folders and would rather be safe than sorry. So I will be converting everything to XML. And I still have a lot of theory exams and worksheets that are nicely formatted and which I still revise in Finale.
My thought is this: if Makemusic really wants to make this transition good for those users who have supported them for these many years, they could and should (I believe) release an open-source limited functionality version of Finale that does only one thing: export mus and musx files as XML files. They do not have to support it. They do not need to maintain any activation methods. Just take that part of Finale that we will all continue to need and put the code out there. Iâm sure that must be possible, right? I donât know enough about code to know how hard or easy it would be. But it seems like the RIGHT thing to do, and at least it would give the rest if the world a chance to maintain that one important component.
Sort of an exhausting day for me. The Finale whirlwind couldnât have come at a worse time personally, as the university semester just started Monday, but Iâm now back with my head above water at least. Some observations:
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Just a terrible PR blunder. Peaksware wants to kill off Finale, and Dorico wants to absorb paying customers, but whew, was this handled poorly initially. Peaksware had to backtrack after a day of people freaking out. A tiny bit of self-awareness could have prevented all the stress if they had just initially released the position they evolved to get to 40 hours later.
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Iâm one of those who felt all the stress, and couldnât really process it until now. For those that donât know me IRL, I was a copyist for jazz royalty for a long time: Jimmy Heathâs for 25 years, Slide Hamptonâs for 20, Arturo OâFarrillâs for 20ish off and on, John Lewisâs for maybe 4, plus did a ton of work for David Berger, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Sebesky, Gunther Schuller, Wynton, Toshiko, Teo Macero, Mike Abene, Manny Albam, Ernie Wilkins, Wayne Shorter, McNeely, Abbey Lincoln, and so on. I really donât care about my own work, as I can always write more, but Iâm not gonna let the work of all those people just go obsolete. Their music belongs in the Smithsonian, not just sitting inaccessible on a bricked hard drive because I bought a new computer that canât install Finale.
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I spent about an hour on the phone today with a really good friend who is Harry Connickâs copyist today. I got the MM âweâve heard your feedbackâ email just shortly after. He was obviously paying attention, but had least prepared well in advance. He has 2014 and 2011 Mac Minis running Finale 2010, both offline, with most of Harryâs older work on it, so various updates didnât alter it. He had also met with Emily Grishman (130+ Broadway shows in Finale) earlier in the day. His main concern was that Harry would just buy whatever new Mac he wanted and Finale wouldnât work on it, so their workflow would be toast.
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One helpful thing came out of this whole mess though! Having to open files individually to fix the âMaestroWideâ vs âMaestro Wideâ font mess from the mid-00âs apparently only affects PCs. When I sent Harryâs copyist a few of my files circa 2000, they opened correctly for him while remaining gibberish for me on the PC. I wish I had discovered this while I still had a Mac Mini, but I guess Iâll probably buy a cheap one just to make PDF export easier. (With thousands of files, I was looking at countless hours of editing.) It still doesnât help the files with Adobe Multiple Master fonts, but at least itâs a start.
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Iâve made PDFs of everything since the mid-00s so have a lot already. Iâll certainly be creating PDFs and MXLs of everything going forward regardless of platform.
That sounds good. I have Finale v26.
Does this mean that if I crossgrade to Dorico, I will also get Finale v27 so that the transfer of data to Dorico works optimally?
Please do remember that in al things digital, there exists nothing like âindefinitelyâ! In this case it will mean something like âafter some time, maybe a few more years, untill the dust is settled we will pull the plugâ.
And OS changes can really have (unwanted) impact, my InDesign v5 (about 2011) did not work anymore on my new Win11 machineâŚ
That is what it says. The details may or may not yet be worked out yet but youâll purchase the crossgrade from within your MakeMusic account. Iâve had Dorico since v.2 plus multiple licenses of Finale 27 so Iâve not checked.
Do not expect the export/import to be seamless but it might be. Your Fonts are the most likely area that will need tweaking and you may have to make some layout adjustments â or not.