Anyone in a nostalgic mood, just read this thread and suddenly it is 2016 again.
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I have used Finale for about 35 years, and I so agree with you about all of that. Thank you, Olli @olli.koskelin, kiitti paljon. The fact that I am now using almost only Dorico, does not change anything of that. If you truly master Finale, you can not not love it. â⌠endless possibilities to [easily] do what you wantâ, yes ja kyllä.
Finale is fantastic, Dorico is fantastic. To me, that is. 
They just are very, very different.
Tapio
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On the Finale forum today, thereâs a discussion by veteran users about the pros and cons of different âworkaroundsâ for putting a fermata on an empty barâŚ
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I also used Finale for three decades. Iâm glad I donât use it anymore. While there are maybe 1-2 things I miss about it, there were so many crappy things that never got fixed or never evolved. Just as one example: if I use a SMuFL font, this typically happens when I open the file unless and until I zoom in (and it also affects playback such that those falsely empty measures do not sound):
Zoom in, and the notes appear magically:
So in terms of Dorico, while it took me a year to get reasonably comfortable with Finale 3.2 back in the day, I got up and running with Dorico 5 in late August/early Sept very quickly thanks to reading the manual (admittedly, not as good a manual as Finaleâs), perusing this Forum (which is better than the manual, IMHO), looking at a few videos, and just getting my feet wet with a long piano work. Iâm now on my sixth composition since I started with Dorico. While there have been some challenges, having mastered Finale certainly didnât get in my way in terms of learning Dorico; there are some similarites among all music notation programs, of course, along with many differences. Once it occurred to me that duration-before-pitch = Speedy Entry with Caps Lock engaged, it made sense. I do have Pitch-Before-Duration set as my default, which keeps me from accidentally entering music I donât want to, and that is also analogous to Speedy Entry with step entry. I never used Simple Entry in Finale, so all I can relate to is Speedy Entry, and Dorico is perfectly fine in that regard. They have made several accommodations for us Finale expats, and thatâs also made it easier to transition.
I would urge you to try it. Yes, itâs more keyboard-centric than Finale was (even with all the shortcuts and metatools one could program in Finale), and I only remember the commands I use the most). But there are also many ways to do the same thing that do not always require keyboard shortcuts, so itâs very adaptable to oneâs methodologies.
UhâŚI love Finale in the way that I guess I love a dysfunctional relative. I do miss the early days when Finale did surpass everything else. I even wrote a paper in business school on how Finale 3.5 was an âelegantâ program. And it was. It just isnât any more.
finale paper.pdf (384.4 KB)
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And of all of them, the most fantastic: Pen(cil) and paper. Write or draw anything, anywhere, instantly. Until AI allows us to write by thinking, unbeatable.
User manual: 0 pages.
Hardware needed: Brain (free). Most people have one.
Software needed: Comes with the hardware (free). Includes a sophisticated playback engine.
Soon, hopefully very soon, Finale and Dorico (and others) will feel and be seen as what they actually are: Unnecessarily uncomfortable to use, ancient, primitive, expensive stone-age toys that efficiently prevent free, creative composing and writing.
As of and by now, the clear winner is: Pen(cil) and paper. Kynä ja paperi. Fantastic.
P.S. Donât get me wrong. As a compromise, I love, appreciate and enjoy Dorico, too, but it is s not my dream come true. Not even close.
U sure 'bout that?
I think what you say is totally mad!
Some people had difficulty making the switch from Finaleâs way of doing things to Doricoâs way.
I expected to also have some difficulty, particularly after having been a Finale user for 30+ years.
I was surprised to find myself very rapidly adapting to Doricoâs way of doing things. There were a few small things that took a bit longer to get used to (like adding beats to measures), but overall, it was surprisingly painless.
I just posted (after major revisions since I first entered it) the first complete work I entered into Dorico: a 3-movement concerto for violin and string orchestra. It took me about a week to enter the notes. I had to rely a lot on my tiny notebook in which I put my âfrequently asked questionsâ. I actually highly recommend getting a little notebook and writing in it functions and features that you find yourself needing to look up often.
If you donât resort to hunting and pecking, and use the resources at hand (the jump bar, the help files, the forum), I firmly believe that Dorico - mostly due to its extremely active forum membership - is much easier to learn and faster than Finale. The design team at Dorico are more responsive as well.
And one thing I really appreciate is that any updates actually contain âupdatesâ to the program. At a certain point I felt like I was paying a yearly fee to MakeMusic for Finale without actually seeing any improvements to it. This often meant skipping one or often two updates.
With Dorico, I havenât - at least thus far - been tempted to skip any updates.
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Agree with âRomanosâ here!
Finale was very strange to get into, what with all the strange icons, weird names for the various features, etc. etc. It felt like a bunch of computer geeks gone mad trying to develop a music notation program. Overly difficult. I found it very unfriendly, but have many friends who still swear by it. Good for them!
Sibelius was a breath of fresh air to me. A computer program that was easier for me to understand and made more 'musical sense." Still keep it on the hard drive for transferring certain old projects as needed and for formatting music for a publisher who has requested I turn in Sibelius files to him to make any edits to my music for some things he has published and put in his catalogue.
Dorico has been no simpler or no harder to learn. Just different. Nothing strange about it at all. Really, all weâre doing is retraining the neural pathways to learn where the various functions are.
The great thing about Dorico is how utterly fast you can get compared to working in any other notation program once you know your way around it and find out how you can really customize it to your own work flow and preference.
Iâd say that overall, Dorico is the easiest to learn and the easiest to accomplish pretty well any musical composing/arranging or publishing task. And I still feel as if Iâm just scratching the surface of many of the possibilities and the true power of Dorico.
And, Dorico/Steinberg has done a wonderful job of creating helpful videos and manuals. There are also some excellent 3rd-party tutorials on YouTube. Between all the support and tutorials, weâre in good hands!
Yamaha isnât going to disappear, and Dorico should be around for our lifetimes. Nothing wrong with that! Pencil and score paper have been around for a long time and will still be around for a long time. (âŚwhich is nice to have in case the power goes out!)
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