Finale 2009, by its own admission, is more paid bug fix than new feature upgrade, and even then it falls short. It is a program full of potential yet completely hampered by bugs. Those skilled in using Finale do not really *use* the program, as much as they have developed a vast palette of workarounds to get the output desired. Using it is feels like building a deck of cards.
I was glad to see that 2009 fixed their incompatibility with MOTU devices using non-default CueMix names (as in “Finale crashes-on-launch, can’t use the program at all” incompatibility). They left this specific fix off the list — but Finale 2007 worked, 2008 didn’t, and now 2009 does again. (Yes, I deleted my preferences.) $90 upgrade for nothing, thanks ’08. It stayed in the box and was never installed.
“Save as PDF…” problems not fixed since 2007
OS X’s built-in “Save as PDF…” feature is one of the best things ever to happen to Finale for sharing music electronically. But just try to “Save as PDF…” a part that has a slash in the name (say “Piano/Vocal” for instance). Finale just decides to leave the part name off. This would barely make sense on WINDOWS (maybe replace the illegal character with an underscore?), nevermind that “/” is a legal character for Mac files. WTF? And hopefully you don’t want to “Save as PDF…” both the score *and* the offending part in the same “Print…” command, because the part will overwrite the score without any warning, and you’ll be left with only the part — but named to look like the score. Nice hack-up of OS-level file operations.
Another example of bad Save box behavior is evident in Auto-Saves. Old Finale files always open as “Untitled” in newer versions. If you have Auto-Save enabled, it will prompt you to “Save As…” upon the first saving. But, if you have any other dialog box open at the time Auto-Save is triggered (which in Finale is extremely likely), the “Save As…” sheet opens behind your dialog box. The save window can be clicked forward in front of the dialog box you’re in, but it never gains the mouse or keyboard focus. Meanwhile, it did manage to steal the focus *away* from the box you were just in, thus leaving you with zero control over the program, no ability to save your work, and your only recourse is to Force Quit, losing all your work. This is exactly the opposite result you should get with an Auto-Save feature. This is not new to 2009. Does *anybody* at MakeMusic actually use Finale on a Mac? They’d find this bug in under 15 minutes. How is this okay in commercially-released software — not to mention, version 2009b.r3!!
Other little things
Staff styles no longer have the final say. My old trick of selectively enabling “Allow optimization” on only certain measures doesn’t work anymore. And when I tried to selectively hide Measure Numbers (staff style with Items To Display > Measure Numbers unchecked), it did nothing.
The new 2009 Expressions categories work beautifully. But the arbitrarily hard-coded six categories is odd, nevermind the fact that it doesn’t merge categories when you import a library file. How else do you push a house style out to other files, then? The whole thing is still clunky and does not foster any confidence. Plus, I heard these categories only came to Finale because Sibelius does them that way.
Lyrics still are tedious in Finale. You already hope and pray they don’t get messed up, and after a certain amount of copy/paste, you give up on keeping anything orderly behind the scenes. I was surprised that now in 2009 Automatic Hyphens and Word Extensions don’t display when you first open the file. Open and close the “Edit Lyrics…” dialog box and they reappear. Why? Why not! (It’s not every file, just don’t forget to always check that the program is doing its job.)
Now that Finale 2009 “runs” sufficiently on Leopard and our score files aren’t stranded forever, it’s finally time to box this line and investigate Sibelius.
You’re being way too generous, IMHO. The Finale 2009 -installer- doesn’t even work if your install volume is case-sensitive HFS+. Once you add a symlink down in /System/Library/CoreServices it to get it installed, part printing doesn’t work, nor do any of the Help menu items. This thing was horribly rushed to market. I’d expect these sorts of compatibility problems from a free app that hasn’t been updated in five years, but really, come on.
It still doesn’t support modern typography standards (UTF-8 characters? What’s that?), and its “human performance” feature can’t even get crescendos and decrescendos right. Here’s a hint: if you see a decrescendo followed by a (non-subito) piano (p) mark, it means to decrease in volume to a soft level, not decrease in volume, then suddenly get louder because piano happens to be much louder than the result of the computed decrescendo. Finale, by contrast, does the latter. Frequently.
And its interpretation of fermatas is absurd. Two fermatas in a row seem to be interpreted as getting slower and slower. There’s no obvious way to adjust how long it should hold a fermata, either, so your only choices are “ridiculously too long” or “play right through it”.
These problems are so bad that I’m finding myself turning off HP entirely more often than not. It’s more of a nuisance than a help.
And if you’re on a laptop, wave goodbye to your battery life. When idle, Finale 2009b sits there wasting 8% of a MacBook CPU core. Because the CPU is never idle, it is not able to drop into its lowest power states (or anywhere near them). As a result, that 8% seems to translate into roughly a 50% loss of battery life. I haven’t measured it precisely, but running AppleWorks and other reasonably well-behaved apps, a single battery gets me through both legs of a flight home with an hour in the airport, usually with an hour of battery life left. Running Finale, I go through two batteries almost completely. So this is using twice the electrical power of an -emulated- PowerPC app. Bad, Bad, Bad!
I’ve started posting bug reports on VersionTracker. I suggest everyone else with significant bugs do the same. Maybe that will shame MakeMusic into getting their act together. That said, I’m not holding my breath.
I suppose I was too generous, but I’ve been privately ranting to myself for every version since 98. You hope with each version that it will come with slightly less suckage, and to no avail. I could go on forever with bugs and bothers, but like any codependent relationship you start to forget how bad it is.
I left out another thing about VersionTracker, too. VT see’s Finale’s version as 14.0b.r3, which is the CFBundleShortVersionString from the app’s package info.plist. Meanwhile, it’s been told that the current version is “2009″, so there is never a match. I report it to VT all the time, nothing is ever done. Again, I have to think nobody is really listening.
You guys are much more savvy than I am about this stuff. I’m a 54 year old musician and I recently made the jump from PC to Mac (which I DON’T regret at all!) and, in doing so, decided to purchase Finale 2009 for my new MacBook (I’d been using Finale 2002 on my PC). I realized there would be a learning curve involved in both the switch to Mac and the upgrade in Finale. But I had NO idea that Finale 2009 would be such a convoluted mess. My current issue is that I can’t seem to get all of my expression tool entries to show up on either extracted OR linked parts. Also, using linked parts feature, I can’t figure out how to look at the score and the individual part at the same time. I have deadlines to make and will not be able to make them due to this sorry-ass p.o.s. I’ve purchased in good faith. Maybe I should switch to Sibelius.
So I landed a copying job for a composer, and he uses Finale, and I use Sibelius 5. I had to get a copy of Finale 2009 in order to do this job, because the score is too complex to just import it into Photoscore and export the MusicXML. Let me just tell you, I have an ulcer from trying to understand that Finale is not musically inclined. How the hell are my tuplets overlappinng? It’s a computer, fix it automatically.
Sibelius and I know exactly what we want to do, we run into the occasional confusion, but Sibelius says to me “OH dude, check it out, I found it in the manual, let’s read this and tackle it together, this is a very important job, don’t fuck it up man.” Finale is all “dude, I don’t know what the fuck is going on, let’s just go smoke a bowl.” Then I say, “dude, I don’t smoke, and neither do you, you’re a computer program.” Then Finale is all: “Dude whatever, stop judging me.”