Comments on: Finale 2009 still sucks

By: John

John — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:09:34 +0000

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.”

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:54:01 +0000

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.

By: brent

brent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:45:52 +0000

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.

By: David Gatwood

David Gatwood — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:02:42 +0000

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.