I know we’re all different—not better or worse, just different—but let me share my own experience transitioning from Finale to Dorico.
The first few days were tricky. I had become so used to Finale that Dorico’s tools and philosophy felt frustratingly unfamiliar. But before long, I realized that it isn’t just different—it’s actually better in many ways. Dorico helps with the things I’m not naturally good at and automatically applies professional engraving rules that I used to struggle with in Finale, often without achieving truly perfect results, since I’m not a trained music engraver.
Writing notes is also much faster. With all the keyboard shortcuts and intelligent automation, the software takes care of many tasks I previously had to do manually. There’s a long list of things that are simply easier in Dorico.
I’m not claiming that I’m right and that people who prefer the good old Finale are wrong, but personally, I definitely prefer Dorico.
And to Dorico: thank you—you’re really great! The only feature I miss is the ability to “print” without actually having a printer! But maybe that will come with Dorico 7!
Thanks. Another recurring question: If I have a project that consists of only 1 flow, how do I NOT have a “1” at the top of the music? I have tried “renaming” the flow and deleting any text there, but the “1” shows up at the bottom right corner anyway. Once I was able to get rid of the “1” but the music disappeared, so I think I got rid of the flow itself as well.
By the way, I HAVE realized that Dorico is far more intuitive about certain aspects of note entry. I hope to get more intuitive about how I learn a new software program.
I am confused: what do you mean?: page number 1 of flow number? or layout name number? or something else? Please upload at least a screenshot, or even better an example Dorico project which shows the situation (if you edited the layout directly you have probably overrides…)
In case you mean page numbers, you can set different options in Layout Options>Page Setup>Flows for the desired layout/s:
I have switched to Dorico, even though Finale may outlive me in terms of remaining compatible with Windows. Yes, it’s a different world, and a good world. Yes, the Dorico community has been helpful. Yes, some of the functionality of Finale was “old”. But we had learned strategies to optimize our time. It’s time that’s a precious resource IMO. And when those creative urges hit, time was on our side. Yes, Finale had every right to change or end its business. In essence, it was a lot like a marriage. The thing I am upset about is that Finale did not talk to the user community, except to say, support ends in a year, boom! What I’m getting at, and I don’t know the inside story, is that had Finale approached me with the idea of paying an annual license fee to keep the business going (i.e. as Microsoft did) , I would have said YES because of the TIME spent working with Finale. I suspect many others would have felt the same. Finale cited the challenge of coming up with regular upgrades. I would have been happy to pay an annual license fee with no upgrades to v. 27. That said, I am appreciative that Finale arranged a transition to Dorico.
There have already been enough armchair autopsies, but.. I think you’re over-estimating the generosity of the userbase. Many Finale users were content to stay on very old versions of Finale (in part because there was very little difference), without paying MakeMusic a further penny.
MM had already slashed their prices in 2022 to persuade users to upgrade to 27, and by all accounts that had not driven sufficient traffic.
If Finale “28” had been announced with subscription pricing, it would have died in the water within minutes. And announcing to your customers that the product is in jeopardy unless they chip in is rarely a successful move, either.
In terms of time, while there is an investment of time and effort in learning a new app, which can feel frustrating at times, I can certainly produce finished scores much faster in Dorico than ever I could in Finale.
A small suggestion here for saving your possibility to use Finale: create a Virtual Machine.
It is possible to transfer all of a machine programs and data to a “Virtual Machine Image”, that you can later run on other machines.
One example of a free program that supports this is VirtualBox (only Windows though). Check as example a vlogger named ExplainingComputers on Youtube, more specifically the episode “Windows Install to Virtual Machine”, only a few days old when this is written.
I was in the IT business simultaneously with a music career. I developed software. MIcrosoft did not say their products were in jeopardy before switching to a subscription model. Their subscription revenue surpassed their traditional license sales despite many competitors, including free open source. Same with Autodesk, for example, the top CAD software, which has hundreds of competitors. Sibelius does both perpetual licenses (which require an annual support/update charge of $99/yr) and subscription ($127/yr). Subscription is the dominant business model in the software industry. Finale could have simply announced a change. My guess is <$99 per year wouldn’t have mattered that much to many long-time users. Dorico is likely to go to a subscription model. They already have one for the iPad. When that happens for the Windows personal user, I predict most will stick around. None of that takes away from Dorico being a fine product, with a better workflow. I don’t mind making the new investment of time. I do mind losing the old investment as it happened.
Transitioned from finale last year and been using it since.
There’re a lot of things I like about Dorico, but i find that i have to be a lot more careful using it compared to Finale. The note entry (i use mouse and manual click and drop notes) is also a bit finicky and takes getting used to.
Dorico is a lot more powerful than finale and has a lot of shortcuts, that’s what I like. But it can really mess up my score if i’m not careful. I would say it’s dangerous to use if one isn’t careful. My latest annoyance is that when i copy over a whole chunk of score to paste , it doesn’t capture the changes in metre. I kinda have to rebar certain sections again.
Yes, I would export everything into .pdf files from within Finale. That might give you some peace of mind for the time being.
For batch conversion I suggest this description:
thanks. I do have everything exported as PDF and also music XML. Unfortunately in Finale I used expressions to represent fingerings and none of those travel into Dorico via music XML.
Since moving to Dorico I’ve only had to revise one work originally stored in Finale . I re-input everything, it only wasted a week.
Now, of course, all my intellectual property is bound up with the survival of Dorico. For text documents there is a standard called PDF-A (PDF archive format). It would be nice for the music industry as a whole if there was MusicXml-A.
But maybe that will come with Dorico 7! 
For text documents there is a standard called PDF-A (PDF archive format). It would be nice for the music industry as a whole if there was MusicXml-A.