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."

Finale... finally!

[scottblascocomposer]

It's about time, really. I've been using Sibelius [sibelius.com] for two years now, and mainly because it was the best notation software available for OS X. I've been watching this thing with Finale, and occasionally sending them emails asking about it, and now I'm pretty psyched to try the demo.

What I'm really waiting for, though, is an option in both (or all) programs to save in some open file format. That would mean true victory for us music tech dorks, and longevity for our files.

No big loss...

[whiteSanjuro]

Having used Finale in my high school, I can safely say that it is the worst software I have ever used to write music. That is to say, it has the worst interface and least functionality I have yet to encounter outside of silly Geocities-style shareware. Cubase/Logic seem much more practical and offer many more options at the same price point.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Bloatware?

[am46n]

There is no escaping the fact that Finale, though rock solid, has always been, and will continue to be, bloatware and a lesson in bad interface design. Anybody serious about using notation software has switched, or should switch, to Sibelius.

Finale suffered from:
-slow redraws (Sibelius was originally lightning fast on the Acorn)
-crap redraws (display artifacts left behind when dragging. None of this in Sibelius)
-legacy nested dialogs that had to fit on the screen of an SE
-crap auto-layout and spacing (Sibelius does this seamlessly in the background without having to be told to do it)
-music takes ages to notate
-no FlexiTime
-no automatic placing of dynamics etc (hard to get continuity of spacing)
-generally frustrating and confusing to use

That's why I stopped buying the updates with Finale 2002. However, if they have seriously addressed these issues and offered a complete rewrite, rather than just a further-bloating of the legacy codebase, I might reconsider my judgement. Past experience says not to hold your breath though.

Re:No big loss...

[whiteSanjuro]

Have you used Cubase's score editor? Because it seems Hans Zimmer [steinberg.net] has...if it's good enough for him, it should be good enough for most of the rest of the world. And yes, I know the difference because I tried to score music with Finale, and I have written songs with Cubase. Just because the sequencer is the default interface doesn't mean there isn't more under the hood.

Re:What's good (and cheap)?

[Analog Penguin]

Dunno about ConcertWare importing, but Melody Assistant [myriad-online.com] has to be the best cheap notation program I've ever used. It has all the other features you mention, and costs $15 (!) with indefinite free updates (which happen at regular intervals, with many new features). It's definitely worth a look.

How does it compare?

[gidds]

I do all my sequencing and notation work in Cubase, because that's what I've always used, and I have an investment in it. I did look at the demo of Finale for a short while, but my impression was that although it made simple things easier, I had real trouble doing anything more complex (e.g. cross-rhythms on the same stave). So although Cubase's score module is a pain to use and needs a lot of tweaking, I've stuck with it. Has anyone else used both - is my impression fair?

Also, has anyone got LilyPond [lilypond.org] working on OS X 10.2(.8)? It looks like an interesting idea -- completely automated notation, done right so that it doesn't need any tweaking, with no GUI and input from a text file (with optional translation from MIDI files &c) -- but installation was a pig. It needs fink [sourceforge.net], so after spending 800MB of my HD and many hours downloading and compiling that, I try LilyPond and get a compiler error! I don't have time right now to try to find out why...

Wonder if they'll have notepad that soon too...

[haut]

I had a music class (gened) and used Finale Notepad in classic mode for notation. To say the least, it sucked. While the timing was OK, when playing a song the sound was behind the cursor (on my PC it was perfect). Also, when I booted into OS9, the timing of the song would be terrible and fluctuating. I didn't understand why it would do that on my ibook, but I grew to dislike all but the PC version of Finale Notepad. I really hope the OSX version doesn't have any playback problems because that made it really frustrating.