The current owners took over the company in 2014. They delivered version 25, which provided 64-bit support and a few other odds and ends -- while dropping some rather significant functionality. I did find Version 25 to be a little more stable, so I have lived with the feature deprecation. Since that time, there have been a couple of small patches -- literally a few dozen bug fixes in 3 years and minimal new capability.
In the same time frame, Avid dismissed the Sibelius development team and moved to development to Russia. They went several years with minimal product improvement, so Finale and Sibelius both seemed both to be on the same dead end track. Meanwhile MuseScore continued to evolve rapidly. And Presonus made an investment in Notion. The big move was Steinberg/Yamaha hiring the Sibelius team to develop Dorico. During most of the past 4 years, that was a "skunk works" or a very immature early product release for enthusiasts. But now that we are well into 2018, the notation world has changed significantly. It appears to me that Finale is still on a dead end, and the company is making no effort to communicate any significant plans. The most revealing thing I could find was this from January: https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/namm-2018-makemusic-smartmusic-finale/ To summarize that article, it sounds like most efforts are in SmartMusic, with practically nothing happening with Finale. It is revealing that they are saying they are not planning anything in 2018 that would be significant enough to charge an upgrade price for. Dorico recently delivered version 1.2, which brings it fairly close to what one could consider a full-function, commercial-grade product. It is still lacking in a few areas, such as playback, but is a very viable product in its own right. And it appears they will launch a major upgrade with Version 2 in the next few months. In the past 12 months, Avid has been very active with Sibelius development, putting out a series of updates, including the most recent 8.4 last week. These releases track with Dorico in making the layout much more flexible and the spacing much more automatic. Meanwhile, it has been roughly a decade since we saw the last real improvement in automatic layout in Finale. I increasingly see Finale as a huge time-waster. It has become typical for 20% of my time on a project to be consumed in final edits that are now mostly automatic within Dorico and Sibelius. If you can pardon my rant, my real question is if anybody sees any reason to be optimistic that Finale is going to be anything more than a dead end. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: finale-unsubscr...@shsu.edu
