Thoughts on Finale, Steinberg, and MakeMusic (March 2026)

Dorico
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(EDITED) Not a complaint, and certainly this not anything the Dorico team had anything to do with, and I suspect even @Steinberg had to follow the lead of their overlords on this.

Simply put, MakeMusic in 2025 concerning Finale end-of-life offered Steinberg a deal it could not refuse. Steinberg/Yamaha made the right choice, of course. Imagine Avid getting ‘hold of Finale - horrors!! (UPDATE: Thanks, @Cookie_Jarvis: As it turned out, no offers were make or whatever. I think there was a legal agreement of some sort? Maybe not.)

When Adobe Flash reached end-of-life, Adobe killed it the right way: end-of-life in 2020 was announced in 2017, giving developers three years to port their work or somehow free their work from Flash.

Software eventually becomes so antiquated, its code can no longer be feasibly reconciled to a modern digital environment. This seems to have happened to Finale, and it will happen to even the mighty Photoshop. (Three decades ago, Adobe PageMaker was superceded by InDesign.)

Ergo, when MakeMusic announced Finale was too long-in-the-tooth for future development, I believed it and still do.

What upsets me still over the whole thing was that MakeMusic did not give the grace-of-time Adobe gave its Flash-users. Even the span of just one year would have been far-better than the nerf-bat it gave the Finale community, shutting Finale from new users and even new downloads from already-existing users (from which MakeMusic had to do a U-turn).

A minimum time-span in advance of end-of-life of three years would have sufficed. I would have put on a minimum of seven to allow users living in a cave to find out about Finale end-of-life and to at least export their work to .xml while making .pdfs of all their work.

The fact MakeMusic did no such thing tells me the decision to kill Finale in such a brutal manner was made by a twenty-something hotshot using Excel.

Were it for me to have done, I would have in 2025 fixed Finale’s bugs as best as possible, maybe put in one last new-feature update fixing little things here and there, and then suspend further iteration on Finale forever except for OS compatibility, bugs, and security updates, keeping this status quo for seven years from an announcement made about three months later, but letting it leak that an announcement was imminent.

During the seven-year time-period, new users would be welcomed with the proviso Finale would be priced at the same rate(s) as Dorico going forward during the seven years, yet there would be no future feature-updates, though bugs, security, and OS compatibility would be addressed.

When the seven years was done, that would be it. Finale would continue to be downloaded for existing users, but no longer available for new users. The final version of Finale would be future-proofed enough to where the next few Windows and MacOS iterations could possibly run it.

Of course, at the start of the seven years, an arrangement with Steinberg would go into effect. Moreover (and MakeMusic may have already done this), a consortium would be set up between the major music-notation outfits (including MuseScore) who would together work on XML/Music XML and SMUFL, making both continually available to all, inside and outside of the consortium.

As it stands, Yamaha has done a very good thing in allowing Steinberg and MakeMusic to come up with the situation we actually have. Had Finale been (God forbid) made open-source, the commercial music-notation industry might have been destroyed.

And I’m glad the open-source MuseScore exists and (at least appears to be) doing well. Its very existence keeps Yamaha and Avid awake at night and the future of music-notation more competitive and iterative, adapting to user-needs for years to come.

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That is probably more likely the truth than not - business culture these days can be cold and abrupt. I’m thinking of Zorg (Gary Oldman) saying “Fire one million.”, from the Fifth Element film.

I’m very happy with the way Yamaha is handling the Steinberg businesses. They have a long term outlook and they understand the need for having a presence in the music software arena and that it’s intrinsic value to Yamaha overall is is worth more than just sales alone. :smiley:

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Finale didn’t offer Steinberg anything, it’s more like Steinberg offered a helping hand by discounting for Finale users. Steinberg didn’t buy Finale and neither would Avid have, Finale users had their own choice to make- stay locked with 27 or change to another program…Steinberg helped out by offering a discount for those who chose to go with Dorico.

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I would start a topic on my best memories of Finale, but end-of-life is more than a year ago.

My greatest “Finale memory” was the introduction of “smart-slurs” in about 1995 (Finale 3.1? - I started at 2.5 on Windows 3.1). Before that, slurs were the bane of any project I did and were always put in as the very last thing, because they did not update with changes in the score all that well. Smart-slurs changed all that.

Finale was my go-to from 1994 through 26 August 2024. I just finished one orchestral project that involved making new parts for A4 paper (score is A3). I had not done parts with Finale in years, and I had to re-learn the whole process.

Finale’s four-voice limit per stave was actually pretty durable. I still find Dorico’s infinite-voices quite amazing. I cannot believe it will be ten years since Dorico 1.0 this year. Given Finale’s pattern of life-span, we may have another twenty years of Dorico.

Given the need for preservation, XML import and export will become more and more important with Dorico, a program so different from Finale in 2017 I found the learning-curve to Dorico extremely taxing, but I got it done. Eventually, I will need to do MuseScore and Sibelius, but since learning Dorico, I do not worry over learning Sib and Muse like I used to. LilyPond, of course, is a different dimension of existence.

Before Dorico, I used Finale for two decades. Year after year and update after update, Finale was my workhorse and the foundation of my career in music transcription and editing, and I miss it as an actively updated product.

Of course, my Sonoma Mac Mini M1 cannot ever be OS-updated. Eventually, it will sidelined as a dedicated Finale machine.

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Interesting read.

I think Finale’s UI and it’s program internal design were quite modern at the time it debuted. But, I can only guess at their development strategy - but I figure there probably wasn’t enough emphasis on its internal underpinnings and data handling assumptions. They painted themselves into a corner, so to say.

The Dorico guys realized a chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity (strangely thanks to Avid) to reconsider some design points. Music to a computer is just data - and the representation of in as we see on screen with staves and systems are just representational aspects of that data (with a ton of human idiosyncrasies). It’s a lot easier to develop software if you separate these concerns - and this is what Dorico has given us with it’s modal operation (Write, Play, Engrave, etc..). They nicely took over the lion’s share of work by automating most layout, leaving you to simply fine-tune it.

I found Dorico to be easy and enjoyable to learn by transcribing an existing score. Fortunately I had nothing to unlearn as music is a hobby, not my occupation - I’m actually a software engineer and Dorico’s approach clicked with me instantly. I would think Dorico to be perfect for a first time user just starting out with a notation program for the first time. They know no particular approach to a music application so it will come to them as a child learns to talk - naturally.

As to MuseScore, they’ve done a lot of over overhauling, but their internals are still based on fixed bars, versus Dorico’s stream-of-notes approach. It’ll be awhile before they can do something like automated condensing in the future.

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The story with Avid and the old Sibelius team’s being snatched up by Yamaha is a genuine miracle. All that went down in 2012, and in late-summer/autumn 2016 (if memory serves), we got v. 1.0 of Dorico.

Dorico’s stream-of-notes is a true wonder, as is its automatic (and downright magical) cleaning-up of scores regarding systems, frames, and stave-widths, among many other things.

With Finale, at least a quarter of my project-time was spent dealing with ten-thousand little cosmetic issues Dorico simply handles without my having to think about it. Only in the moving of barlines and beat-elements (in a visual sense) do I miss Finale.

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Well, I don’t miss Finale at all. I switched to Sibelius early on, while the Finn brothers were still involved and the designers were worrying about such things as colored and patterned backgrounds, so it would look like you were writing on paper. Egads!

But at least it worked, which Finale never did, for me. I used to scream at my computer when using Finale, and my wife got tired enough of it to demand I find a new software, so I did. I remember the sigh of relief I uttered the first time I launched Sibelius.

When Avid bought ‘S’ I was devastated, but of course that was soon solved when Yamaha hired Daniel. Love Dorico and have never looked back.

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In 2014 MakeMusic was purchased by Peaksware, an umbrella company owned by LaunchEquity Partners, a venture capital firm. VCs don’t buy companies for the love of their products; they buy them because they think they can structure the company in a way that it (or its IP) will be profitable. The first thing they did was fire almost everyone that worked at the Minnesota MM office and move the headquarters to Boulder.

Since that 2014 purchase, the only updates to Finale have been:

Finale 2014.5, 11/2015 (free for 2014 users): Basically bug fixes, almost no new features.

Finale 25, 8/2016: 64-bit support, which was pretty much forced by Mac and PC OS if they wanted to be able to keep selling updates. Dashed slurs, a couple of time sig options, not much else.

Finale 26, 10/2018: A bunch of articulation improvements. These were actually useful! Speed enhancements, bug fixes, not much else.

Finale 27, 6/2021: Mostly just the SMuFL fonts, which anyone could just get for free. Some SmartMusic integration, bug fixes, not much else.

This is not a company that had shown any interest in developing Finale any more than bare minimum of what was required to keep the update cash flowing. This was glaringly obvious to me by 2019 and was one of the main reasons I switched over to Dorico then. In 2021 I wrote, “the integration with SmartMusic instead of any notation development seems the most telling aspect of this update. I suspect Finale is drying up as a revenue stream … I wouldn’t be surprised to see Finale completely rolled into the SmartMusic banner in another update or two.”

I was obviously wrong about Finale being rolled into the SmartMusic banner as they just killed it off completely, but SmartMusic is clearly using elements of Finale’s code and IP, which is why Finale will never be open-source, abandonware, etc. The point is that to anyone paying attention, Peaksware had shown little interest at any point in their ownership of actually developing Finale further and was simply using the IP and milking the update revenue stream.

Don’t forget their initial 8/2024 announcement said they would only support the program and keep the activation servers up for one year. After a huge backlash they caved and said they would keep the servers up “indefinitely,” but this is a VC company that does not want to keep Finale costs on their books. Why would they possibly give a 3 year end-of-life announcement and have to pay to support it for 3 years when they could just kill it off and be done with it? A 7-year proposal is completely absurd as I seriously doubt the activation server will even still be running in 7 years. What would Peaksware possibly gain by paying for this? I assume in another few years after any outrage has died down and most users will have found another notation program, they’ll just quietly shut down the activation server. Again, this is venture capital, where the bottom line is all that matters, not a Leland Smith writing code for the love of computer notation.

Finale was my main software for 25 years, but there’s no use pretending its demise was anything other than a financial decision. It either was not profitable, or not profitable enough, so they killed it off. They certainly weren’t going to spend any money on “one last new-feature update” or any sort of extended support period. The Finale IP is clearly still valuable and is used with SmartMusic. It is what it is.

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You might appreciate a spin through this thread started the very day of the big announcement, @jeffrags:

There’s a fair amount of outrage along the way, but if you follow the thread, also lots of more positive memory-lane kinds of posts.

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A man can retroactively dream. I had not known of the VC aspect, though.

Always dread any outfit with the following in its name: partners, venture, equity, holding, and invest-.

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Eventually, I want to transition all my old Finale work to XML and hopefully free myself from this now-dead software.

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Thank God, nobody is likely to buy Yamaha out and turn Dorico into a zombie.

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A bit OT — and not really wanting to start a new discussion — but personally, while it seems a good idea on the surface, my experience with other markup show that many “standardized” elements get interpreted differently by the apps that use them. HTML tags such as “em” (emphasis) show up as bold, oblique, or italics in different browsers despite the standard. Applications add their own tags outside of the standard as well. As far as XML, just look at the problems with importing and exporting that exist between Finale, MuseScore, Sibelius, and Dorico now. I want to hope that you’re right about saving as XML but I would consider a backup plan (PDF, etc) as well. :wink:

— Jim

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I started using Finale on my PowerMac (my first one other than the Mac Plus my girlfriend, then fianceé, then wife brought to our household) around 1994 or 1995 and at first entered notes painstakingly on my computer keyboard since, although I composed on an old Ensoniq KS-32 synth that is next to me now and still used to this day, I had not yet figured out MIDI and how to connect the two. Once I purchased a Mark of the Unicorn serial port MIDI interface, I was good. I loved Finale at that time. It was owned and developed by Coda, and they had forums on Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL (I’m dating myself) and were very responsive. It took me about a year to feel comfortable with Finale, and over many years more and more features were added and bugs were fixed. It was all good; I even wrote a paper entitled Finale 3.5.2: a Critical Analysis of an Elegant Application for a management information systems class in my MBA program.

But after MakeMusic bought Finale, it was a gradual, downward trend. First they pushed the Windows port on us Mac users by bundling both Mac and PC versions on a CD-ROM and really encouraging switching to that other OS. Then with Finale 27, they likely initially cut out most or all of us long-time beta testers (I’ve yet to meet anyone who was a beta tester of F27.0, although I suspect some existed in a small cohort) until later point versions, and there was little or no development or bug fixing that was obvious (I mean, porting a few really good plugins to be included in Finale by default is not exactly a major new feature, nor was having some sort of cloud to showcase scores after most of us had our own web sites for that already). There were a lot of good things in Finale, but also a lot of bugs, and a lot of old features that were stuck in the early 2000’s like the Shape Designer (90’s-level MS Word or MS Paint interface). The UX was very inefficient and got in the way at that point. Instead of what had been an “elegant” piece of software, Finale had devolved into a bloated, buggy mess, undoubtedly due to lots of spaghetti code from the late 80’s. The thing is, I still remember a release of Finale from the early 2000’s in which they noted there were really no new features but they rewrote the code from the ground up to make it more or less future-proof. Apparently that was up there with “Mission Accomplished” or “Nuclear Plants Obliterated.”

So it was not too surprising when we all got that announcement in August 2024. Disappointing but not surprising. Very little had been done to fix longstanding bugs and I was getting excuses for at least 2-3 years from the dev team after filing them and repeatedly checking on their statuses. Their forum is not like this one nor the early forums when Coda still developed Finale; if there were any developers lurking, they were extremely incognito for the last few years.

Reluctantly, in all honesty, I switched as soon as feasible to Dorico 5. I was reluctant since I had Finale files dating from many years and also, as I was then still working and traveling a lot, didn’t think I had sufficient bandwidth/time to master Dorico. But while there are still things I’m figuring out as I go, I got comfortable enough with Dorico within a month to start a new work, and since leaving Finale I have composed 12 works that were all notated in Dorico, eight alone in 2025 (more than the max of 5/year I would generally notate via Finale). So it was very doable, and I only wish I had switched to Dorico 1-2 years earlier if not even sooner.

That said, I did spend the past year also going through my previous Finale-based scores and making sure I didn’t need to tweak anything. That was good because once I started testing macOS 26, some things stopped working correctly for me (the worst being the Smart Shape tools, since whichever one Finale decided to default to would be the only one that could be invoked, and never one I ever used in a score). All my scores are on my site as PDFs, and other than occasional tweaks or putting together parts, I should be good. Trying to get mXML to reliably help export my files to Dorico in a way that doesn’t require a ton of work has not worked for me, but that’s ok for the most part.

So while it’s interesting that at least one Finale-only plug-in of which I know is still being developed and apparently sold, I can’t see a near-term future for using Finale as a composer. But for those who still do and have pondered all sorts of complex and impractical measures to try to ensure Finale will run for years, I guess there is interest in keeping it all going. As a physician, I wonder if there is some sort of “Finale perseveration” syndrome or something.

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@L3B

My experience is a bit different although, now, I do not miss Finale so much. I started using Finale about 27 years ago and enjoyed 99% of every minute using it. It allowed me to do things so much easier than manually writing notation on staff paper. I did not have the best of luck with playback in Finale as that, in my opinion, was a lot more cryptic especially when one needed to send control changes to a VST.

Now with 18 months or so of Dorico under my belt, I no longer waste time on wanting or reminiscing about Finale v27. The user environment seemed a bit more refined than Dorico, even now, but Dorico works from a completely different perspective so I surmise that Dorico will ultimately have a very refined user interface very, very soon. (And no, I am not going down a rabbit hole with anyone wanting to know why I think this!)

I churned out about 350 new compositions in Finale over the last 5 years that I used it and never considered screaming about Finale not doing what I want - it did do what I wanted 99% of the time. So that 1% of time where I was frustrated with it had to do with playback and getting CCs to various VSTs including MakeMusic’s own Garritan libraries which one would think would not be an issue - but it was, at times.

Nevertheless, I obtained both the Dorico and the Sibelius crossgrades. I spent about a day with each as I acquired them. Although Dorico was not as intuitive as the marketing claimed (at least to this old brain), Sibelius was even less intuitive to me so Dorico became my choice. I keep Sibelius running just in case a publishing house prefers to have Sibelius files. But I have no qualms at this point being a dedicated Dorico user and I have no intentions of renewing my Finale skills.

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