Somewhat clickbaity and inaccurate title, but a nice read with input from @dspreadbury and @DarcyJamesArgue on the whole Finale saga. It’s sort of funny seeing our little music notation world being mentioned in a larger media outlet.
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It’s gratifying to see many of the relationships and history accurately reported for a general audience. My deep experiences with Finale had become nearly irrelevant until a month ago.
As for decades’ worth of music … I predict that at least half of all that work in Finale is going to end up just saved in printed and PDF forms, rather than imported for continued editing.
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The facsimiles of the digital age…
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Thanks for sharing that, @FredGUnn!
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Yeah, it’s going to be way less than half! I bet only about 1% is going to ever get converted. I have over 14,000 Finale files and I’m not planning on converting any of them until needed. I’ve already made XMLs of everything and am gradually making PDFs of the older stuff. (From mid-00s on I always made PDFs) I have a Dell laptop that’s several years old running Win11 and that’s going to be my “Finale laptop.” It isn’t currently connected to the internet so won’t ever have the OS updated. This way I can still do some work in Finale in an emergency in the future if Finale can no longer can be authorized or won’t work in a future OS. I suspect that will be a rarity though, and I’ll mostly be working with XMLs and PDFs.
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Also in a Dutch paper. (Finale not Dorico) One of the major papers in the Netherlands.
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Unfortunately can’t be read without a subscription to de Volkskrant.
"[Finale]… had to be complicated, because it did 100 more things than any preceding program.”
“But Dorico is so complicated!” 
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Archived version here.
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What I immediately appreciated about that striking sentence was just how intuitively obvious it is — or at least “should” be (to use the term in vogue here these days) — that powerful and flexible software capable of rendering notated music is going to be a complex/“complicated” thing.
Written music is based on numerous interactions operating in multiple dimensions between a large number of elements in a complex symbol-system. And all of that musical-semantic content then has to be rendered with flexible spacings, readability, even visual appeal, etc. Then add in the intricacies of virtual-instrument playback…. This ain’t Tiddlywinks!!
And yet everywhere some users continue to think it should somehow be simple. “Why should it be any more complex than writing with a pencil and a ruler?” I have given up trying to explain to such people. With that line of thinking, you might as well use any graphics program to manually draw staves and barlines and stems and beams, and place each music symbol by hand, like plate engraving.
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“Why should flying this F-16 be any harder than driving my Impreza?”
I’ve never understood this line of thought either. You never hear graphic designers complain, “why is Illustrator so complicated when Paint is so simple?” If you want super simple, drag and drop mouse input, go use Noteflight or something, but don’t expect professional-level results. If you want professional-level publishable results, you need a notation program that is capable of addressing all the complexities that music presents.
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Thanks hrnbouma!