Finale 2004 Available for Mac OS X

sunrein writes "After years of Mac OS X being available, MakeMusic has finally announced production and a Jan. 16 ship date of Finale 2004 for Mac OS X. This announcement comes after a public relations fiasco earlier this fall when the release date was pushed back just days before it was due to ship in late October."

Good Timing-NOT.

[Spencerian]

Finale is a music composition application, and, based on the article header and apologetic text throughout the vendor's page, it is an application late in coming.

That lateness won't make it easy to compete with any market or mind-share taken by the availability of products such as Symbolic Composer 5 [mracpublishing.com] (which appears to be shareware), and Apple's SoundTrack. [apple.com] The introduction of the new iLife application GarageBand [apple.com], while not a full-featured composition tool, certainly can't help Finale in competition.

(Disclaimer: IANAMusician)

Post-Macworld?

[koehn]

Why, oh why, would you wait until the week AFTER MWSF to announce this? Hopefully somebody got shot for getting the CD masters out two weeks too late.

Was anybody at MWSF who got to see these guys? What were they saying?

Re:Good Timing-NOT.

[divbyzero]

Err, music notation programs are pretty much the textbook example of why the presence of a GUI does not automatically make a tool user friendly. Designing an interface for music notation is an extremely difficult task, and there are both good and bad GUIs, good and bad CLIs. Finale's unintuitive, overly modal GUI is one of the main reasons why they've lost so much market share to the newer competitor Sibelius.