FYI. I was on the Finale Forum (the official MakeMusic-run forum that oddly doesn’t get participation from MakeMusic) yesterday and the site was as it had been; not very active, but at least not hijacked. Tonight there’s this, and it goes on for a long time:
Not related to Dorico, of course, but some of us here were very active on the “official” Finale Forum for many years. Sad… But in all honesty, who knows if MakeMusic will even notice its forum has been hijacked? Shame there is no good way to contact them other than to complete a Finale bug report, and they didn’t really respond to those over the past few years in my experience).
About Finale or their forum site being spammed? Yes, it’s possible to get a response if you file a Finale bug on their support site, but it often took a prolonged time to get a response, and that was before they declared Finale “end of lifed.”
You could pretend that your question is about the Dorico crossgrade… I got a response from them within hours last September when I had an issue with purchasing that. That was by far the fastest response I ever got from them in 20+ years.
Agreed. I was pretty active on the “old” Finale forum, as were you, but never cared much for the “new” format when they switched over 8 years or so ago, and pretty much quit checking it. I think the news of CEO Grégory Dell’Era’s departure at the beginning of this year is just a further sign that Peaksware wants all Finale stuff off their books ASAP. They’ll probably just give the forum a year from the initial announcement with obviously very limited involvement and then shutter it. After the strong reaction to their original activation server announcement, I think it’s safe to say there probably is another year for it after that, but going forward, who knows? I can’t imagine it will still be running much longer than that.
I also agree. They used to have a useful forum many many years ago with input from their team, much like here. But then they made it a place for users only, and while they did allegedly peruse the forum, I think it was very rare that any of their developers would chime in. They also have a separate area for new ideas/suggestions, but that was also user-run and good ideas often just got shut down. In fact, looking over my many years of support tickets that are still accessible through their site, I would get a “Those are great ideas! How about if you post them on that forum for suggestions?” So it was a way of making users go away if they had suggestions, rather than actually taking them seriously and embracing or dismissing them after some consideration.
I will be surprised if the forum lasts until September but perhaps it will. The user-run, unofficial forum will likely continue, but I would be surprised if it is still trafficked very much in the next 1-2 years.
I understand the folks who want to keep using Finale. But I also don’t understand them. I plan on composing for the next 30 years or so, and strategically, it makes zero sense for most people to continue to use a discontinued notation software package when there are alternatives, and good ones like Dorico. Finale has many bugs, and it hasn’t been really developed for a few years now (adding some third-party plugins and SMuFL support is hardly innovative IMHO). I mean, Wordperfect had its advocates back in the 90’s, but does anyone really use it anymore?
