I have been following the discussions about Finale, Apple Silicon and the eventual disappearance of Rosetta 2, and I am perhaps a little less worried about it than some others here.
My situation may also be slightly unusual. I have a large archive of Finale files going back to 1991. I no longer use Finale for new work — Dorico is my working notation program — but I do need to retain reliable access to those old Finale files.
The important distinction, at least for me, is that I do not need Finale to remain a complete working environment indefinitely. I do not need playback, audio plug-ins, MIDI hardware, Garritan, or even particularly good performance.
I need Finale to do four things:
- open an old Finale document;
- display it correctly enough for me to inspect it;
- allow the occasional small correction;
- export MusicXML.
The resulting MusicXML then goes into Dorico, where I check it carefully.
I deliberately do not batch-convert my Finale archive to MusicXML. There are too many files, and MusicXML conversion is not something I regard as an archival process that can safely be done unattended. Tuplets in particular can produce well-known surprises. My normal procedure is therefore:
Finale file → MusicXML → Dorico → check
and, if necessary:
Finale file → fix the offending tuplet or other detail in Finale → new MusicXML → Dorico → check again.
For the same reason I see little benefit in converting thousands of old .mus files to .musx merely for the sake of doing so. Finale 27.4.1 has so far opened my old files successfully. I would rather preserve the originals unchanged and maintain a reliable way of opening them when required.
At present I am keeping three separate routes available.
1. Finale 27.4.1 for Mac
Finale 27.4.1 itself is a Universal Binary and runs natively on Apple Silicon, so Rosetta 2 disappearing does not directly kill the Mac version of Finale.
Of course, this does not mean it will run on macOS forever. Finale is no longer being developed, while macOS certainly is. At some point an unrelated OS change may break something that nobody is going to fix.
Still, for as long as it works, this is the simplest route.
2. Windows 11 ARM in UTM, with the x64 Windows version of Finale
This already works for me.
One important detail here is that I use Windows 11 ARM, not x64 Windows under full CPU emulation. Windows itself runs natively as ARM64 in UTM, while Windows’ own x64 compatibility layer translates only the Finale x64 code.
Trying to emulate an entire x64 Windows installation in UTM is a completely different proposition. In my experience it is intolerably slow and not really usable even on a very fast Apple Silicon Mac. There is little reason to emulate the whole operating system when Windows 11 ARM can run natively and only the comparatively small amount of x64 application code needs translation.
In some ways I regard this as the strongest long-term archival option. I can keep a complete UTM virtual machine containing Windows, Finale and everything required to open the documents. The VM can then be copied to several drives and stored in several physical locations.
This seems considerably safer to me than buying an elderly Mac and placing it reverently on a shelf.
A years-old computer contains a years-old motherboard, power supply, SSD or hard disk, capacitors, display electronics and so on. Eventually one of them gets a vote.
A virtual machine image, by contrast, can be duplicated perfectly.
So rather than preserving one old computer, I would rather preserve several identical copies of the old computer as data.
For my particular Finale use case the virtual machine does not even have to remain a pleasant general-purpose Windows installation. It only has to boot, launch Finale, open a document and produce MusicXML.
3. Windows Finale under Wine
This currently works too, although on Apple Silicon the conventional Wine route has relied on Rosetta 2.
This is where recent developments are actually rather encouraging.
Apple has stated that normal Rosetta support will continue through macOS 27, while from macOS 28 Rosetta functionality will be restricted to certain legacy games.
But CodeWeavers has already demonstrated a native ARM64 version of CrossOver for macOS using a customised version of FEX to translate x86/x64 Windows code instead of relying on Rosetta 2. Their current ARM64 Mac build is still a preview rather than a finished replacement, but the important point is that the architecture already exists and runs.
So the future Wine path is potentially:
Windows x64 Finale → FEX → ARM64 Wine → macOS ARM64
rather than:
Windows x64 Finale → x64 Wine → Rosetta 2 → macOS ARM64
Wine itself has also been gaining substantial ARM64/ARM64EC infrastructure, so this is not merely a speculative idea about something somebody might perhaps write one day. The transition work is already happening.
Whether Finale works perfectly under the eventual ARM64/FEX Wine stack remains to be tested, of course. But my requirements are rather modest. I am not asking Wine to turn Finale back into my main scoring workstation. If it can open a 1994 score, let me repair one questionable tuplet and export MusicXML, it has done its job.
So I do understand the concern about Rosetta 2 disappearing, but for archival Finale access I do not presently see a catastrophe.
I see three independent layers of insurance:
native Mac Finale while it continues to work;
a frozen Windows 11 ARM/UTM Finale environment;
and potentially ARM64 Wine/FEX as the third route.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is to preserve the original Finale documents and at least one known-good environment capable of reading them.
And if that environment can be stored as five identical VM images in five places rather than as one increasingly vintage Mac in a cupboard, I am quite comfortable with that.
