That alone is a very strong reason to not buy Finale unless you absolutely have to interact with other Finale users in a way that would require having it. I forgot about that move to CO…that is absolutely relevant. It would be very very costly for them to build a new team in CO that could fully assimilate the legacy code base and do significant changes from here moving forward.
The good thing is that at least they didn’t just close up shop and say “hasta la vista”, like many software companies have… yet anyway…
One thing in Finale’s favour is that their user community is just as helpful as Dorico’s, I always found. @cparmerlee, point taken; I didn’t mean to imply anything sinister
Yes, the community is very helpful. Many of them have been using Finale for 20 years. Many of the leading voices appear to be copyists/librarians more than composers/arrangers, who might be tied to a particular publisher’s “house styles”. Finale can be made to produce just about any style with enough fiddling. I think most of the power users are rather dependent on a plethora of strong add-ons develop by the user community (Patterson, TGTools, etc.) With Dorico’s design, just don’t find a need for what is in most of those plug-ins. But the Finale user base, such as it is, has a solution that does what they need it to do, so they seem rather satisfied with the static nature of the product.
For me it was all about playback. I can have different rules for different VSTs, midi editing was actually okay, I could easily offset notes (critical for legato/slur articulations, etc. However, it doesn’t support ReWire or an equivalent yet so it doesn’t sync with a DAW. But that might not be important to you quite yet.
I tried Finale and hated it. I actually really like how Sibelius is laid out but that manual sound set thing is a KILLER. UGH! Notion 6 surprised me. It’s pretty thin on features but is good enough for me to use it when I’m composing in Cubase and syncing with Notion via ReWire ports for the orchestral stuff. Once Dorico has the ability to sync with a DAW, I’ll probably be exclusively using Dorico.
One thing I am looking forward to in Dorico is the ability to customize the dynamics curve. But that’s just crazy me.
I suspect what Mackieguy means is having the ability to change the curve at the bottom, independently from the top. Each library is different with regard to the velocity triggering of a desired layer, so more detailed control of exactly what velocity a P or an mf generates automatically will be incredibly handy. I do think that an independent velocity curve option is likely to be attached to each expression map (maybe in D4) so that it won’t be a project wide setting, but having even greater control as I mentioned above, would be even better. If the desired velocity doesn’t happen automatically though, don’t forget the wonderful velocity editing features in PLAY mode where you can adjust this value very easily.
I used Finale for decades and just switched to Dorico a few months ago. In Finale I produced everything from jazz charts to complete orchestra works, and as time went by Finale’s interface required more and more steps for each edit. I just produced a 198 page score with Dorico and I’ll never return to Finale.
(After using Sibelius from its start) I have switched to DORICO from the first version. Fantastic. Love it. I have a composing student using Finale. We have no problems to exchange scores via XML.
yes, as every library has a different relations between the dynamic levels, I applaud Dorico for having this feature, despite its current limitations. Ultimately, though, it would be best do be able to set a specific value for each level as Sibelius does (although I don’t much like the implementation there) at both project and Expression Map level.
In the meantime, flattening the bottom or top independently can be done to some extent by using a scaled secondary dynamic controller among other things.
I’m late to the party here but did want to weigh in. Full transparency:
I’ve been a Finale user for about 30 years, dating back to v. 3.2, and am also a long-time beta tester
I’m a composer
Without question there are quirks with Finale, and it had certainly suffered for years from a lack of imagination, a lack of significant development and new features (the MIDI tool has been largely unchanged since I started using Finale in the early 90’s), and general bugginess. That said, it has enabled me to do a lot of things and can do pretty much anything I’ve thrown at it over the years. The sound libraries are quite good, and if you add in NotePerformer (which supports Finale very well), it’s amazing. There are many free (JW Plugins) and paid (TGTools, Perfect Layout, etc) plugins, some of which are indispensable for me (honestly, the free JW Rhythm Copy is one of the main reasons I have stuck with Finale bc it just is so useful, along with JW Change).
I’m not seeing anything in Dorico, honestly, that I can’t do in Finale. For sure Dorico might be more straightforward. And I would love a piano roll MIDI editor, although that doesn’t do anything in terms of actual notation. But I think if I were starting out again, I’d probably go with Dorico. And that hurts me, since warts and all, Finale has been part of my life for three decades. And I have not seriously contemplated switching to Dorico (I would not even think of changing to Sibelius or any other applications, but Dorico does have momentum, which is good).
As others have mentioned, it really depends on what your individual needs are. I write minimalist music, but have also used Finale to notate a lot of very (VERY) complex scores from when I was much younger and didn’t know better ;-). So Finale is extremely versatile. I don’t know yet if Dorico is quite as versatile; I’m sure it keeps getting better and better, but there is pretty much nothing Finale can’t notate if you put the effort into it. And again, the plugins and the community have been wonderful. But if I were someone starting out, maybe I would have gone with Dorico. Best advice is to demo both of them and see what you need.
In many cases that’s true. But for me, it’s not worth it to change; every notation program has quirks and challenges. Much much more straightforward, as one example, to set up a new ensemble in Finale than in Dorico, unless something has really changed. There are going to be things that, depending on your needs, can be done much more straightforward in Finale than in any other program, and vice versa. None of these programs is perfect; all have their strong points. I’m personally more interested in getting things notated in terms of rhythms, being able to move multiple measures around and copy them, and I’m very much used to Speedy Entry in Finale to accomplish note entry and the Selection tool to copy/move things. Does Finale crash at times; yeah, you bet. But it has met my needs for 30 years; that’s saying something. Everyone should use what he/she finds most useful. Again, if I were starting out, that would likely be a different thing. But I’m still finding a lot of new things to learn about Finale. Any program that’s been around that long will likely have that level of complexity and functionality. But what that also means is that if I suddenly need to do something I’d not needed before, chances are good that Finale can do it quite well. I mean, I can write text with BBEdit on my Mac (a simple but powerful text editor) but let’s be real; when I need to write a medical paper to be published, I’ll of course use Word. Most things in Word are never used by 99% of people. Until there is something they do need. And for that, Word can do it, whereas BBEdit can’t.
I doubt there is a single person here who would argue with that choice. You have been doing something for 30 years. You can get the job done with a known and acceptable level of frustration. It is a perfectly sensible choice for a person to make.
But honestly, just about any project can be done in 1/2 or 1/4 the time in Dorico once you have invested in the (considerable) learning curve. And more importantly to me, I make far fewer mistakes than I made with just about every Finale project I did (also 20+ years living with Finale.)
If you don’t want to invest the time in the learning curve, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. For me, it was about 90 days before I felt more productive in Dorico than in Finale, but is is all gravy after that. That’s 90 days of sometimes very tedious learning. It was hard enough for me that along the way, I compiled a Word document to note everything I was afraid I might not remember. That document is approaching 100 pages now, so I very well understand why a person 30 years invested in Finale doesn’t want to go there.
To be honest, while I’m not opposed to open discussion, I’m frankly at a loss to understand why you’d take the trouble to come to this forum to reactivate an 8 month old thread just to say (in so many words) that you don’t find dorico all that compelling and that you’re going to keep with finale after 30 years. …congrats?
No problems here with Finale or your use of it. Not sure when this topic stopped being about comparison and started being a Finale v. Dorico slag match. Anyway…
But seriously, weird analogy - Dorico in this case is figuratively speaking a fully fledged word processor, and if you’re concerned about vintage and experience, why not use WordPerfect? It’s got at least 3 commercial years on MS Word and was in open development long before that…
Having said that - I’m making cheap gibes. You don’t need to defend your choice of music notation software, and a Dorico forum is an odd place to do it…
Was merely weighing in on some of the comments here that did specifically compare them. Not odd at all. I am struck by the devotion to Dorico however, as compared to the lack thereof for Finale in many online posts I’ve seen over the years. And the word processor metaphor is apt. We don’t use most of what those applications offer and the same is true for most notation programs.
Given your own many posts in various Finale forums over past years it seems odd for you to be so dismissive of Finale. Use what you want. My point is that if I were starting out anew I might have decided on Dorico. In the other hand as a long time Finale user it’s hard to switch given the many scores written in various versions of Finale, the considerable feature set of Finale that has worked for me over thirty years, and frankly, its flexibility. My sense is that Dorico has its way of doing things. Fair enough but maybe I want a different workflow or a different workspace. Multiple people have indicated online that they were struck, coming from Finale, by how “my way or the highway” Dorico’s UX is.
Anyway, who cares? Someone originally asked here what one would recommend to a young person starting out, and while I feel Finale has served me well over the years, a newbie might be better served spending the time learning Dorico. Hardly a defense of Finale.
For me, I barely have time to compose let alone learn another major piece of software. Hey, Finale might become something only us old-timers use. I don’t know. But I also sense MakeMusic is willing to up their game. And competition is good in this case.
I also couldn’t live without JW Rhythm Copy. My interest is in getting the notes down and for me that one free plugin is super helpful and Finale-only. I’m less concerned with engraver stuff. I’m not a copyist, just a (minimalist) composer, and I don’t have any great interest in the nuances of some arbitrary notation rule. Everyone’s needs are different.
So please spare me polemics about how wonderful Dorico is and how sucky Finale is. It isn’t Stockholm Syndrome I and other Finale users are afflicted with. If anything, I could say there is a certain analogy to someone leaving one’s native country for greener pastures and then proceeding to describe life in the new country as utopian and trashing where he/she came from. I’m glad Dorico exists; having choices is a good thing.
But please, let’s stop describing people like me as living under some delusion or being in love with our “captors” (in this case, MakeMusic), which is what Stockholm Syndrome implies. That’s pretty silly and insulting, and coming from someone who posted wide and far about the benefits of Finale, a bit sad.
Considering that most if not all of your posts on the Finale forum are complaints, I wonder that you feel the need to come to this forum to complain about a program you don’t own. On the Finale forum, you claim that your complaints are only to make Finale better. I do not see how you can make that claim here on Dorico’s behalf.
I use both Finale and Dorico. Neither is perfect, nor ever will be. Both have advantages. The two programs have different legacy code and different goals. Use what you want.
