I have been using a number of Finale upgrades over the years - 2004, 2012, and just upgraded to the current (Finale 27) edition. It is a very useful tool for making printable scores and arrangements, and being able to hear a computer demo of what you've written. It's probably a lot neater than what you're going to write by hand.
However, through the various editions, I've found various bugs and problems that make it seem like it would actually be quicker and more reliable to hand-copy the music than fight with the software to get a reliable result. It's very complex software, and there's lots of features-but the things I'm looking at should be default settings.
For instance:
- it regularly prints things on top of other things (measure numbers and dynamics that overlap or "collide"
-on previous editions I have printed orchestral parts and they lost measures (it's good practice to print measure numbers over multimeasure rests, and every measure-but it's still very bad software if your parts lose measures!)
-on the newest edition, I'm making parts and when I print them, the formatting changes, so things I have painstakingly edited revert to being a big mess. I can only imagine the horror of thinking you've proofread all your parts only to print out 100 pages and find out they're unusable. (If you can actually get an orchestra to play your music, you're probably going to get blacklisted if you hand them sheet music that's a total mess).
-if you write an orchestral score, you put two similar instruments (e.g. flutes 1 & 2) on one staff, but then you need to have two separate parts: one with the high note and one with the low. Finale has a "parts" feature where you can make parts from a full score, but it won't work for this (rather standard) practice and you either have to write the flute parts in two lines or extract the flute part into another file and edit the two parts out note-by-note. Kind of defeats the point of using computers.
-overall the amount of nitpicky proofreading that you have to do to get a clean score and parts is unacceptable-it is literally the purpose of the software, and there's been tons of updates to get it right. Why do I still have to spend hours fixing every stray and colliding element of the score? I can understand that to get unusual results may require a high level of proficiency with the software, but to simply have a "f" mark under a note that is lined up and doesn't overlap something else should be as simple as point-and-click
Overall, it does a lot of automated things I'd rather it didn't, but doesn't do many automated things that would be useful. I'm sure that if I spent many hours studying all the tutorials I could get better at using its features, but by then it would be updated and half of them would be different and there's still no excuse for it changing a page when I tell it to "print!" It's a great tool for creating a legible (but sloppy) score and getting sound demo, but I can't help but think actually producing neat and professional scores on this actually takes longer than it would by hand.
Makemusic Finale 27 Professional Music Notation Software Academic (Download Card)
3 | 3 ratings
Price: 99
Last update: 10-04-2024
About this item
Advanced sharing functionality: Finale 27 lets you quickly and easily share your music notation with anyone. You can upload and share privately or publicly, without ever leaving the app.
Support for Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL): SMuFL is a growing comprehensive standard that organizes musical characters into a common layout so music fonts are displayed correctly across every notation program that supports it — so you can spend more time creating and less time searching for music symbols.
Revised instrument list: Finale 27 sports a revised and expanded instrument list that ensures your notation looks great — no matter what instrument you’ve selected — and that you hear the proper sounds when playing back a document.
MusicXML 4.0: The latest version of MusicXML captures more information then ever, giving you even more control when transporting your compositions, so you’ll be able to confidently and efficiently move files between today’s major music software apps.
Quality-of-life updates: From quirky installer behavior and unusable display scaling to unexpected crashes and problems with printing, MakeMusic has addressed known issues that can slow down your creative process. The result is that Finale 27 is extremely stable and runs smoothly on both macOS and Windows platforms.
Support for Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL): SMuFL is a growing comprehensive standard that organizes musical characters into a common layout so music fonts are displayed correctly across every notation program that supports it — so you can spend more time creating and less time searching for music symbols.
Revised instrument list: Finale 27 sports a revised and expanded instrument list that ensures your notation looks great — no matter what instrument you’ve selected — and that you hear the proper sounds when playing back a document.
MusicXML 4.0: The latest version of MusicXML captures more information then ever, giving you even more control when transporting your compositions, so you’ll be able to confidently and efficiently move files between today’s major music software apps.
Quality-of-life updates: From quirky installer behavior and unusable display scaling to unexpected crashes and problems with printing, MakeMusic has addressed known issues that can slow down your creative process. The result is that Finale 27 is extremely stable and runs smoothly on both macOS and Windows platforms.
Top reviews from the United States
Matthew Schwarz
Too buggy for professional use, too expensive for amateurs
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2021