Finale

» see finalemusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Finale is the kind of software you only meet if you write music down for other people to play. That was never my work. It is in this cemetery because on 26 august 2024 a company ended a thirty five year old product in a single press release, and because a very large amount of the printed music in the world sits in a file format only that product fully understood.

Phil Farrand wrote the first version with John Borowicz for Coda Music Software in Minnesota, and it shipped on 16 september 1988 for the Macintosh at a thousand dollars. The demo people still remember is Farrand at a MIDI keyboard wired to a Mac SE/30, playing a line and watching it appear as notation on a grand staff. By any later standard the transcription was slow and the screen was tiny. In 1988 nobody had seen a computer do it at all.

What made it last was the other half of the promise. Past transcription it handed you the engraving itself, down to individual beam angles and note spacing, which is what a publisher needs and what a hobbyist never touches. That produced the reputation it kept for decades: it would do anything you asked, and it would make you learn a great deal before it did.

On 26 august 2024 MakeMusic said Finale would no longer be developed or sold, effective that day. Support ran one more year and ended on 26 august 2025. The company's explanation was about weight, that "Finale's millions of lines of code add up" against operating systems that keep moving. Its president said the shorter version: Finale was no longer the future of the notation industry.

My distance from this one is total on the music side and short on the other side. I have never engraved a score. I have spent twenty years watching people's work get locked inside a vendor's file format, and that is the part of this story that travels. A composer with thirty years of.mus files is holding an archive whose only complete reader is a program that will never be updated for the next operating system.

~ the case file ~

~ the notation wars ~

Sibelius arrived in 1993 on the Acorn Archimedes and reached Windows in 1998, and for the next two decades notation was split between the two names. Finale held the publishers and much of American academia. Sibelius was easier to learn and took a lot of the composers and the teachers with it.

Then Avid cut the London Sibelius team in 2012, Steinberg hired most of them, and that team wrote Dorico from scratch, shipping in 2016. Twelve years after the layoffs, Finale's owner handed its customers to the same people. The 26 august announcement came with a Dorico Pro crossgrade at 149 dollars against a 579 dollar retail price, plus a free upgrade to Finale version 27 so anyone taking the offer could open their own files with the last release that would ever exist.

~ what the files became ~

Finale files are.mus, and.musx after 2012. Both are proprietary. MusicXML was the interchange format between programs and Finale supported it up to version 4.0, but interchange carries the notes and drops the engraving decisions, which for a publisher is most of the actual labor.

So the practical answer for a large archive is to keep an old machine that can still authorize a copy. MakeMusic says authorization will keep working for the foreseeable future, a sentence written by people who know they cannot promise more than that. Dorico added a Finale importer and it is a good one. It is also a translation, and translations lose the same thing every time.

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