OT - how (not) to organize software support.

Back in 2015, I bought the last upgrade to Finale that I’m ever likely to have.

A mere four years later, I just got an email thanking me for buying it, and a link to a “getting started” video.

Maybe I’ll put as note in my diary to watch the video, some time in 2022. There’s no need to rush into learning something new :smiley:

Better late than never :grin:

To be fair to the wonderful people at MakeMusic, I just got another email apologizing for the first one.

Our email system is being upgraded to better serve you, and we are still working out the kinks. Thank you for your patience while we get this right.

I won’t be holding my breath waiting.

Just this week I downloaded a trial version of v26 to evaluate the trial of the medieval2 plugin and I can’t believe I ever used to use the program. It’s infuriating. The number of steps you have to take to accomplish anything… the menus buried in menus… the multiple tool pallets that cove each other up and open in random places… it feels like stepping into the dark ages.

I know there’s a bias because I’m rusty and have to google to figure out what the heck is going on, but I can still safely say that Dorico is a quantum leap in the right direction.

My favorite Finale “feature” is last item in the File menu: “Save Preferences”

?!

… some of which get saved using that command, while others don’t.

If you want to improve MakeMusic’s response, you really should complain on the Finale site.

Why would I wan’t to improve it? Laughing at other people’s incompetence might not be politically correct, but that doesn’t bother me :slight_smile:

Been there. Done that.

“If you want to fly, you really should jump off a building.”

Well, theoretically yes, that is the way one would go about it. But your results may vary.

As with an ex-wife, I’ve moved on and don’t feel it necessary to go into the details of what was wrong. We still have to interact occasionally, for the sake of the children.

My new wife is lovely, though.

I never received the original email, but I did receive the email apologizing for the mail I never received. Means Makemusic was truly sorry this time … :wink:

It could be worse. Somebody at work once lost their lunch box somewhere between the car park and the office, and decided to send an email asking if anybody had found it (including a detailed description of all the contents…)

Which might not have been so bad, except they didn’t realize that “send to all” actually sent about 60,000 copies of it to every continent on the planet (yes, we did have a few employees based in Antarctica at the time).

A few hundred of the the recipients were kind enough to explain in detail how to use the email system properly - and hit “reply to all” with their explanation.

And a few really helpful employees then sent “reply to all” messages to each of those few hundred people explaining what they had done wrong…

Normal service was resumed a few days later. History does not record what happened to the lunch box.

Ha, had a similar incident (although much smaller in scale) just recently. Someone sent a mass email and accidentally made all the recipient addresses public (by putting them in the wrong field). And then someone else responded to point out the mistake to the original sender – by replying to everyone (which made the addresses visible to everyone again!). Some people! :unamused: