It’s the end of an era in notation software. 35 years after its launch as Coda Music Technologies’ Finale, the groundbreaking notation software has reached the end of its life. Developer MakeMusic is offering a heavily discounted crossgrade to Steinberg’s Dorico, saying Dorico represents “the bright future of the notation industry.”
MakeMusic is working directly with Steinberg to offer Finale users Dorico Pro as their new home. The crossgrade to the full version of Dorico Pro costs $149 – down from the retail price of $579 – and is available now “for a limited time”. It also applies to Finale PrintMusic users. If you have a MakeMusic license on your account, I think this upgrade is a must, as it’s the lowest price ever for the top version of Dorico Pro.
Effective immediately, there will be no further updates for Finale, PrintMusic, Songwriter, Notepad – the entire product line. Purchases and upgrades will be frozen.
You can continue to use Finale on any computer that already has it installed, but you won’t receive updates, meaning operating system upgrades could break your copy.
Starting in August 2025, authorization and reauthorization will also be discontinued. (I expect this will not go down well; it would be nice if they released a version without authorization requirements at that time for compatibility reasons.)
The press release doesn’t mention file transfer, but sharing files between notation tools is now much easier than it used to be. Now is a good time to take a look at MusicXML (which MakeMusic helped develop).
MakeMusic’s message is clear: switch to Dorico. And the decision is not that surprising; Finale just doesn’t seem to be able to compete in the current market. From the press release:
Greg Dell’Era, President of MakeMusic and Alfred Music, says: “Four decades is a very long time in the software industry. Technology stacks change, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale’s millions of lines of code add up. This has made it exponentially more difficult to provide value to our customers over time. Today, Finale is no longer the future of the music notation industry – a reality after 35 years, and I want to be open about it. Rather than release new versions of Finale that would provide little value to our users, we have decided to stop development. I am convinced that Steinberg’s Dorico is the best home for our loyal Finale users and the bright future of the music notation industry.”
Steinberg has all the crossgrade information:
Frequently asked questions about crossgrade
Dorico seems to be the best choice as it is currently the most complete realization of the vision of Finale (and later Sibelius). It is not your only choice, but it has gone the furthest in creating a complete system for creating scores in the most automatic and visual way possible for a wide range of musical practices.
To put this into context, let’s go back to the 80s.
Finale story
Released in 1988, Finale was the brainchild of developers Phil Farrand and John Borowicz. It was far from the only notation tool of the era—today’s Apple Logic Pro began as Notator, for example, and Farrand had even developed a simple notation tool for the Apple II (which later became Polywriter). But Finale was arguably the first product to fully combine a graphical user interface and advanced automatic notation tools. It had Photoshop-style tool palettes and could perform advanced spacing, beaming, and other notation tasks. And it did so with a level of sophistication and advanced notation output that set it apart from competitors like Passport Designs’ Encore.
Here is a great review from December 1988 for Music technology:
Coda Music Finale (mu:zines, my endless addiction)
(Or, if you like, read my Macworld 2011 and 2004 reviews.)
If you’ve been doing this for a while, be prepared to see some familiar faces:
By the 1990s, Finale was the leading graphical tool for producing commercial scores, publishing, and TV and film work, and was favored by both concert and Hollywood composers. I qualify it as “graphical” because many engravers still preferred tools that used manual processes more akin to pre-digital engraving. (Leland Smith’s SCORE was a favorite well into the ’90s — and in case you sometimes thought Finale was mysterious, SCORE ran on DOS with no graphical interface and was coded in FORTRAN.)
Great overview of the interface, even if listening to the Ableton Live 1.0 demo song is jarring (and some of you will feel like you’re on hold at the Berlin office in the early 2000s):
But then Finale faced competition in the form of its main rival, Sibelius. In the early 2000s, I ran training courses for grades 1-12 teachers on how to use Sibelius, and I can say that I had no qualms about criticizing Finale’s more complex interface. To be fair, Sibelius and Finale outdid each other in terms of features, with Finale continually adding notation details that Sibelius often lacked and introducing groundbreaking features like advanced integration with Garritan Personal Orchestra.
It’s understandable that Finale wouldn’t last forever. But it’s still bittersweet to see an independent product laid to rest. And there’s just so much music history tied to this particular tool.
There are also some mysterious bits to mention. An early (perhaps the first?) version of the Finale Manual was written by David Pogue, now known as one of the world’s leading technology journalists and a correspondent for CBS. The Manual’s time was seminal: He built his business on a series he called “the missing manual.”
Phil Farrand, when he wasn’t working on Finale, had a second life as Star Trek Bean counters – seriously – with Guide for bean counters and Nitcentral, which uncovered all continuity problems in Trek, The X-FilesAnd star Wars. These instructions are still in circulation and some have apparently made it onto Kindle.
But this turned into a third life, as Farrand had a successful career as a novelist and science fiction writer.
I’ll stop here, but I sense a pattern. Someone starts their career with music notation software and Finale, then later takes an almost comically nerdy career path and generally avoids writing scores again. Wait a minute. I fit that pattern too. Fascinating.
