For me, I find it helps me to think of Gemini and the like not as the entity with all the answers, but more as the world’s fastest and most knowledgeable intern. You still have to be in charge and check your intern’s work. But it’s incredibly powerful, as long as YOU remain in charge… for now. In five years, who knows?
Hi David. I’ve been using Finale for 33 years, since version 3.0. I’m sure you can remember how primitive Finale was in those early days compared to v27, and how many workarounds and bug fixes were added over the years. Comparatively, Dorico is still in its early development stage and so we must expect it to have things which still need to be ironed out, and we must allow the team time to improve it. But it already does many things a lot better and faster than Finale ever did.
For about a year after I started to learn Dorico I felt I would need to continue using Finale, because of the many things I was finding difficulty with, which I knew how to do so easily in Finale. It’s frustrating at first that you need to keep looking things up and asking questions, but it gets better as you gain experience. I will continue to use Finale for urgent projects, but I can see that won’t be the case for very much longer.
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One of the problems/challenges in coming to a new program is that many things are similar, while others are not. Music notation is the same, but how we achieve it depends on the software which just enough in common to lead us to think, “yeah, this’ll be easy.” It’s similar to being fluent in a Romance language - if one knows, say, French, there’s a lot of Italian and Spanish that can be recognized; and not: it pays to know the difference, say, between jamon and jabon (ask me how I know…).
I’m still learning, and it’s kind of fun to go back to scores I created 5 years ago and see how much I missed, and how much easier - and better - it is when I understand how it is actually supposed to work. But, it takes time. And patience. And a forum such as this.
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I used Finale for nigh on 20 years, and now I am an avid Dorico user. It required a change of mindset, and an acceptance; but I would never go back now. I find Dorico a great improvement: more modern, quite intuitive once you accept a different approach. I would never go back. I love using Dorico.
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Welcome on board Paul, and certainly I won’t be the only one, to say this!
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Welcome, fellow Finale “refugee!”
Alternatives have their own frustrations and tediousness. It took me about 6 weeks to produce a decent score when I switched to Dorico 8/2024. Since my process is composition plus engraving, that wasn’t too bad for learning new software and Google-ing answers as to how to do whatever. The biggest issue was figuring out what was done in Write vs. Engrave since Write is not in a WYSIWYG format although its new Page View after making Engrave Mode changes does tend to visualize those changes.
Nevertheless, be irritated and frustrated and use that energy to spur your education around Dorico. Its playback capabilities, alone, are well worth the effort. In a few months, you will be fairly comfortable. Then you will simply search for how to do some subtle things that may or may not be consequential in your final product.
So, I used Finale for nearly 30 years and begrudgingly went to Dorico. I recently deleted Finale from my Mac never to even consider using it or anything else again.
P.S. The Garritan VST libraries work very nicely with Dorico and allowed me to continue to use sounds with which I was intimately familiar such as GPO5.
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This works most of the time but sometimes not so much - maybe 95% to 5%, works to doesn’t work. When it doesn’t work, chances are the answer can be found by searching this forum.
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Perfectly said!
PL
Welcome to the Forum.
As a dedicated Dorico user now, I would not want to go back to Finale either. I think the more you use Dorico, the less intuitive some of the features are. Nevertheless, the key is to search for the answers here, in the manual and/or on the web. Web searches often reveal some very informative videos and other content.
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Not sure about the choice of words 
(although I perfectly understand)
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I would say “Finale alumnus (alumni).”
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Another 20+ year Finale refugee here. As upset as I was with the way Finale ended, the irony is that any software can come and go, no matter who owns it. I bought the Dorico upgrade when MakeMusic first announced the end. It sat on my computer for a year as I stuck with Finale. Three months ago, I stumbled on an avant-garde piece I had composed forty-eight years ago for a seven-piece ensemble. There it was…the perfect opportunity to learn Dorico. Took me several weeks to input because of tricky rhythms and playing techniques. But I think it got me over the initial hurdle. So, as others suggested, inputting a prior composition was very helpful, and to me, more rewarding than a tutorial. My impression is that instrument voices sound more realistic in Dorico playback than they did in Finale. The difficulty of coming up with worthy updates was cited as a reason for mothballing Finale. I had so much time invested that I would have been happy to pay an annual license fee whether there were regular updates or not. And I suspect many others would have, too. But the question was never asked. I doubt I will compose again in Finale. Happy creating!
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I gave up Finale shortly after the MakeMusic announcement, despite over 30 years of using Finale, because it was clear to me that with all the unaddressed issues in Finale, combined with no further development, it was a dead end. I managed to learn Dorico pretty quickly, especially having used Finale all those years (which took me at least a year to really get fluent with in the 90’s) and have composed a ton since then. If anything, my output has significantly increased since I’m not spending as much time trying to deal with rests, fight back against all the bugginess of Finale, etc. Over the past year I made some minor fixes to earlier works I had notated with Finale, and it was always a slog, but I’m essentially done now. All my scores on my web site are probably as “correct” as they’re going to be, along with my albums that are on Bandcamp, Spotify, etc. It made no sense to me to compose a new work in Finale as of August, 2024, and I’m really glad I moved on. Much better than to have kept going with an outdated, bug-ridden notation program. At one time, Finale was just amazing; I even wrote a business school paper on how Finale 3.5 was an elegant software program, and it was. Very sad that it deteriorated over the many years. But that’s in the past.
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I understand what you mean, but to make it clearer to a new user:
Write mode has three different views – Fill, Galley (similar to Finale’s scroll view) and Page view.
Engrave mode has only one – Page view.
Page view of the two modes should show exactly the same thing, not only tend to. Where do you see that they don’t, Kent? I cannot think about anything.
Fill and Galley are, just like Scroll view of Finale, working modes where you don’t do layout work at all.
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Amen to that!
Hi My immediate response is Musescore - which I found to be so much easier to understand and use productivly with little trouble. But, after several months of Dorico (often quite painful) usage, its certainly a much more comprehensive program, particularly with its midi cc change capabilities - and its superb capabilities in creating and using expression maps to get exactly the sounds I want from my associated sound libraries (ie. VSL).
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MuseScore Studio has issues with its playback engine-even when using major-name ‘Made for Musescore’ libraries: inconsistencies in articulation and volume-in spite of indicated dynamics; score and part formatting are woefully inadequate for professional use in larger scores. Dorico, of course, excels at all of these. The biggest plus with Musescore is that it’s free and sounds OK. It’s fine for P/V/G scoring. So happy I left Finale for Dorico (before it was killed); I forgotten how to do much of anything in Finale anymore 
I’ve done some of my best composing and arranging with-and because of-Dorico.
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