Steinberg and MakeMusic have today announced a strategic partnership to provide a pathway for users of Finale to make the transition to Dorico Pro, following MakeMusic’s decision to sunset Finale. To read the official announcement from MakeMusic, click here.
How we got here
We should first take a moment to celebrate Finale, which has been an important part of the music industry for more than 35 years. Introduced in 1988 for Apple Macintosh, and a couple of years later for Windows, Finale was the first desktop music notation software to gain widespread adoption in music publishing, music preparation for film and TV, musical theatre, and in education. The world in which Finale first appeared is almost unrecognisable to us now: the first colour Macintosh had only been released the previous year, Windows 3.0 would not be released for another two years, Windows 95 was seven years away, Mac OS X twelve years off, and the first iPhone nearly twenty years in the distant future.
The first version of Finale was written by Phil Farrand, a young musician and programmer who wanted to realise his dream of seeing music played on a MIDI keyboard automatically transcribed into music notation by software. His first attempt was an application called PolyWriter for the Apple II, which was published by Passport Design in 1985, and he then developed Finale for the Macintosh. He called it Finale because it would be the last music notation application he would ever write. Finale was published by Coda Music Technologies, and a few years later, in the early 1990s, Phil allowed Coda Music Technologies to buy him out, and he left the world of music software development to pursue a successful career as a writer.
It’s hard to overstate the impact that Finale had in its early years. In 1988, if you wanted to print a set of parts from Finale, it could take hours – people would leave their Macs and their Apple LaserWriters churning away overnight and hope everything would be printed by morning. But it was orders of magnitude faster than doing the work by hand, and because the parts could be automatically extracted from the full score, whole classes of copying errors were eliminated at a stroke. As with so many endeavours that have been transformed by computing, this was revolutionary stuff.
While there were many other commercial music notation programs born in the 1980s – Don Williams’s Encore, Leland Smith’s SCORE (which of course had its roots at Stanford University two decades earlier), Jack Jarrett’s Music Printer Plus (an early progenitor of Notion), Geoff Brown’s Deluxe Music Construction Set, Donald Byrd’s Nightingale, to name a few – none of them were as widely adopted as Finale, and none of them continued to be developed consistently throughout the 1990s and beyond. Finale rapidly became the choice for professionals in many fields of music, and its position as the industry standard seemed unassailable.
It was only with the arrival of Sibelius for Windows and Mac in 1998 and 1999 respectively that Finale’s dominance was challenged. The rivalry between Sibelius and Finale throughout the 2000s spurred the developers of both products on to increase their power and sophistication, all the while keeping up with the seismic changes in technology, including the rise (and fall) of hardware sound modules, the rise (and rise!) of the Internet, the arrival of sample libraries, and so on. The team working on Finale – their company by now renamed MakeMusic following the merger between Coda Music Technologies and French company Net4Music – worked hard to compete with the upstart Sibelius, which had the advantage of being built on technology a decade newer than Finale’s foundations, a lifetime in the world of computing.
The following decade was tumultuous: MakeMusic was taken private in 2013 by its largest shareholder, Peaksware, and renewed its focus on serving music educators with its SmartMusic software – today known as MakeMusic Cloud. The company would later relocate its staff thousands of miles across the US from Minnesota to Colorado. Finale was not alone in facing headwinds: in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, and already suffering after over-extending itself through acquisitions in the preceding years (including Sibelius Software Ltd in 2006), Avid withered to half its former size by 2012. Among more than a thousand people laid off, Sibelius’s development team was dismissed (whatever happened to them…?), condemning the product to become moribund for several years.
In the middle of the decade, Sibelius and Finale were joined by our very own Dorico in 2016, the first significant entrant into the market since the 2006 introduction of Notion from VirtuosoWorks (later Notion Music, Inc., eventually acquired by PreSonus in 2013). And a new generation of online music notation applications, like Noteflight and Flat.io, has appeared, together with the inexorable growth of open source programs like MuseScore.
Through it all, Finale has endured, with its most recent major version, Finale v27, being released in June 2021. There are not many creative applications introduced in the 1980s that are still widely used today. Finale finds itself in vaunted company: Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Steinberg’s own Cubase. These are iconic applications, and Finale sits proudly among them.
However, all good things must come to an end, and the team at MakeMusic have made the difficult decision to end development and sales of Finale. You can read more about their decision on the Finale blog.
The way forward
We understand that this news may be unexpected and difficult for many Finale users. MakeMusic will continue to offer technical support for Finale v27 for another year, until 26 August 2025, and it will also be possible during that time to reinstall and reactivate existing Finale licenses. So there is time to adjust to this new reality.
We are very pleased that the teams at MakeMusic and Steinberg have been able to join forces to provide a pathway for Finale users to continue their musical journey with Dorico Pro. Thousands of Finale users have already successfully crossgraded to Dorico over the years, and we are confident that Dorico Pro can be a worthy successor to Finale for many thousands more.
Our partnership means that MakeMusic can offer a crossgrade to Dorico Pro for all existing Finale and Finale PrintMusic users at a very special price for a limited time. MakeMusic will be contacting every registered Finale user by email with details of how to buy your crossgrade – but if you’re already ready to buy, you can log in to your MakeMusic account to find your special offer at the MakeMusic Store.
Learning a new music notation application after years of using Finale sounds daunting, but we will be by the side of every Finale user to help them make a success of the move to Dorico Pro.
We asked expert Finale user and Dorico convert Ben Byram-Wigfield to produce a series of videos to help introduce Dorico to Finale users, which you can find on our YouTube channel.
We have also prepared an extensive set of frequently asked questions that we hope will answer all the burning questions Finale users may have about this transition.
As the weeks progress, we will also provide further resources, videos, live streams, and the opportunity to ask questions to our product specialists in real time in webinars. Please keep an eye on our YouTube channel and our other social media channels for these events as they appear.
In the meantime, if you have any questions that are not answered by our FAQ, please get in touch either in the comments here on the blog or via our forum. We are looking forward to welcoming many Finale users into the Dorico user community, and hope that you will be happy with your new tool.
I expect the Dorico Team may be especially inspired over the coming year to develop Dorico capabilities important in Finale that may not yet exist in Dorico. This could be an interesting year for Dorico upgrades.
JV,
One thing I’ve always missed was a decent real time transcription capability in FInale. I’d be thrilled to write that code for Dorico if they are open to it!
Michael Glenn Williams
Hi! I have enjoyed the cross grade offer. I downloaded the Steinberg Download Assistant, inserted the code i received from makemusic, but the Dorico Pro 5 doesn’t appear at my “products downloads” section. Why?
@deyvid: Sorry to hear you’ve had problems. I checked our system and it looks like you got this all figured out, but please drop me an email at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de if you’re still having issues.
I bought finale 27 just before the announcement of the end of development of this software. today i found out that finale users who buy $149 of Dorico 5 get finale 27 for free! if i buy finale 27 do i get Dorico for free? please help!
@Milosz: If you bought Finale 27 as an update, you can probably ask MakeMusic to refund the purchase of the update and then buy the Dorico Pro crossgrade instead, which will also get you the Finale 27 update.
I have used Finale 30 years. Does Doric support32 bit operating systems?
@Scott: I’m afraid not – Dorico requires 64-bit Windows and macOS.
I’d be honored if you would add my music scoring program and sequencer to your list SuperScore and Masterpiece, for the Atari and Mac, in 1987. I’d love to help Finale users out there transition by writing a converter program or even managing FInale on open source on Github if it made sense.
Looking forward to learning Dorico now.
Many thanks,
Michael
A direct converter that avoided the Finale->MusicXML->Dorico process (especially if the next OS breaks Finale) would be celebrated. I’m surprised the Dorico team is not already working on this, but I’m sure it would do well for you.
In addition to your software, I’m surprised they left out HB Engraver, which was the standard for a hot minute.
Thank you Steve!
Will I be able to convert my Finale files to Dorico Pro? How easy or difficult will this be?
@Tom: Please visit our FAQ page for the answer to this and many other questions.
How much hard drive space and processor speed does Pro need?
@Tom: You can find detailed system requirements for Dorico Pro at the bottom of our FAQ.
How long does the offer to purchase Dorico for $149 for present Finale users last?
@Peter: No end date for the special price has been announced, but it will not be any time soon.
From what I’ve read, the crossgrade discounted price is only available for a limited time. Can you clarify what that time frame actually is?
@Teresa: We haven’t announced the end date for the special price, but you have plenty of time to make your decision. The special price will not be withdrawn any time soon.
Hello Daniel,
is it possible tosend you an email?
TIA
@Alessandro: Of course, you can reach me at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de, or come and find me on the forum.
It would be better if Dorico/Steinberg just kept Finale operable as a legacy product for those who owned it and can prove ownership of it. The fact that you can’t even install Steinberg/Dorico on whatever hard drive you want is just bad design (I have multiple and it forces it on my C: Drive which has less space). The fact that Finale is making it so that Finale products are basically unusable on new devices after August 2025 with being no longer to register it is just wrong, morally and ethically. WE bought the product, WE own it, WE have a right to use it. But no, Finale is basically forcing this down our throats. Typical 2024 business: You do not truly own what you buy.
@Alan: Dorico itself doesn’t really care what drive it is running from, but there are shared components that are also used by other Steinberg products on your computer that do need to go in the standard locations specified by Windows. The Dorico application itself is pretty small, and doesn’t take up much space. The main storage requirement is for the sound content, and you can move that wherever you like using Steinberg Library Manager, which is installed on your computer.
Alan is absolutely right: discontinuing technical support is one thing but preventing the purchaser from transferring the software to another computer in the future (by stopping the authorizing process) is another thing — it is horrible business practice. I wish someone would sue the company or create path that gets around the authorizing process (which limited the user to two computers anyway). The least thing the company should do is to provide a conversion tool for other software, as suggested by Michael Glenn Williams (xml files are a very imperfact path). Many musicians have their life’s work in finale files, which will be UNUSABLE after 2025 if their computer breaks!
That is kind of over dramatic… The work can be used on another computer that still works and has Finale running on it.
As many people have already stated, you have one year to install your Finale license on a virtual machine that will run on any modern computer, so there should not be so many losses. At least, they are transparent and you know what to expect. I recall something about Works in the 90s (or early 2000s) that was discontinued and caused quite some problems…
Could not agree more. The combination of stopping support and trying to move business to Dorico is a bad business practice. I sense a lawsuit coming. Why not do a last update and give out reg codes that can be used with your serial numbers on any future computer. ( a reg code update file could do this as well). Avid did this for Sibelius, I can still use version 6.1.2 and just moved it to a new win 11 machine last month. This is beyond shady. Lots of school music programs do not have the upgrade to Dorico budgeted for in addition to lost time learning new software, etc. Shame on you Make Music!
Agree !00%, Martin. Sadly, I doubt that a lawsuit would be viable, but I have friends whose life’s work literally is in Finale files! My own output, dating almost from Finale’s inception, certainly is. I’m angry, but I don’t see any way around what is being suggested (switch to Dorico) without cutting my nose off to spite my face.
There was an email sent by MakeMusic yesterday that states that the functionality of the authorization process will be extended indefinitely.
I only recently upgraded to the latest Finale on a new computer that’s “air-gapped” as we don’t have internet. I only use Finale for editing scores and playback to check for errors. Surely I’ll be fine going forward and won’t need to do anything?
@Emily: Indeed, provided you never need to update the operating system on your air-gapped computer, Finale should operate on there for the foreseeable future exactly as it does today.
Hello there, is the crossgrade only a english version? Can i download a german version too? Thanks in advance.
Time will tell for me – I’ve started the learning process – but I feel like the 5 year-old Suzuki violin student, who can play the Vivaldi violin concerto flawlessly, but now is being told you must learn to read music as well. Starting that new process, taking one back to the beginning is one thing for a 5 year-old, but for a 70+? A similar thing happened in aviation when new aircraft started using Flight Management Systems instead of analog navigation concepts. Many older pilots simply retired, thinking it wasn’t worth it, or found the task too daunting. I’m not sure I can learn the “style moderno” when after 26 years, I was more than proficient at the “style antico”.
Marx (Karl not Groucho) described it as “creative destruction”. From the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, to the obsolescence of cassettes, VHS, analog phones, etc. . . . people must adapt.
Time will tell.
All well and good but the stupid Steinberg Download Assistant won’t run on my computer. Dorico does but the SDA doesn’t. Unfortunately you can’t get necessary files without it. I’m sticking with Finale until it doesn’t work anymore. Any company that puts out such garbage software doesn’t have my confidence.
@Richard: I’m sorry to hear you can’t run SDA on your computer. You can download all the necessary components for Dorico from our web site here.
A number of composer friends who use(d) Finale contacted me since the news broke, since they know I’m an avid Dorico user (no pun intended). One of them already purchased the competitive upgrade and noted some features missing in Finale. I have opted to help my pals acclimate to Dorico when the need arises. While they are still a little shell shocked, I think their composing productivity will markedly improve with the speed and ease of Dorico’s workflow. 🙂
Wondering how long Finale users will be able to get the deal on Dorico mentioned by the president of MakeMusic? In other words, How long is “a limited time”? This is a big decision…I don’t know Dorico from Doritos (no offense intended.)
@Susanna: No offence taken! You definitely have enough time to explore Dorico Pro for its full 60-day trial period before you have to make your decision, so please do take your time, ask questions, explore the software. Thousands have made the switch in this first week and we are already seeing comments from lots of those new Dorico users saying how pleased they are to have made the switch.
Hello,
On the Steinberg site the Dorico Pro is offered at 579$ VAT included…
if I accept the Dorico crossgrade the Vat has to be added, why?
I live in Europe, BTW
@Alessandro: MakeMusic is based on the United States, and it is required that they charge VAT at the appropriate rate for the customer in their local country. If MakeMusic did not add the VAT on, they would effectively be selling the software for less to customers in Europe than they do in the US. I’m afraid VAT is a fact of life for all of us here in Europe! (It’s also normal for the price shown on web sites in the US to exclude applicable state sales tax, which is always added on at checkout. Customers in the US are used to that too.)
I only recently upgraded to the latest Finale on a new computer that’s “air-gapped” as we don’t have internet. I only use Finale for editing scores and playback to check for errors. Surely I’ll be fine going forward and won’t need to do anything?
Makemusic allowed us to authorize Finale on up to two computers. What is the limit for the Dorico license? Do I have to buy a license for each computer?
@Jonathan: You can install and activate Dorico on up to three computers for your own use.
It’s great to see you have Lua scripting built into the program. It would be helpful if you could publish your PDK, as Finale had done, for the Lua geeks out there… and also make it so recorded scripts go into the Library repository rather than the project folder, to make repeat (but not immediate) use easier. I’m very pleased to be discovering how many Finale things we relied on scripting for are built in to Dorico (stack application of markings, for example) – and your DAW-like Play mode is something Finale really needed (but was never going to do!).
@Jon: Right now, the scripting in Dorico isn’t hugely functional. You can achieve basic macro recording, but the kinds of complex scripts you can make using JWLua or Robert Patterson’s Lua plug-in are not yet possible in Dorico. You might check out the ConsoleTools Lua scripts by Alexander Plötz – search for information about them on the forum.
How many installs are allowed. I just purchased Dorico 5 Pro yesterday for my iMac (cross grade from Finale via offered discount)? I’d like to add it to my laptop. Please advise.
@Jeff: You can activate Dorico Pro on up to three computers for your own personal, exclusive use.
I have used Finale for some years and am now in the process of “cross-grading” to Dorico Pro 5. I started by activating a 30-day demo and before that was up I bought the cross-grade through MakeMusic. I can see in MyProducts that I now have two identical products except one is labeled “Trial” which expires 10/25/2024 and says it’s active on my computer. The product that I bought says it is not active on any computer.
I now find that Dorico is worried when I start a new project that I am changing things on a trial version. I haven’t been able to find a way to transfer the operation of Dorico to the bought product.
Could you please explain the method to me?
Thank you,
@James: Hopefully it’s as simple as running Dorico Activation Manager and clicking “Deactivate” for the Dorico Pro 5 trial and “Activate” for your new permanent Dorico Pro 5 license. If you have any problems, come to the forum and we’ll help you.
I’ve been a dedicated Finale use since 1993 but in the last 20 years my software has been supplied/authorized by the institution where I teach. I’ve decided to purchase my own copy of Dorico in order to set up a home machine with Finale (offline) so I can continue to do my time-sensitive commissions while gradually learning Dorico. The problem: it seems I can’t do the crossgrade with Finale v27 included because I don’t have a current personal version of Finale. Is there a workaround for this? Is this a Steinberg question or a MakeMusic question? Thanks in advance.
@Chad: You could write to MakeMusic support, explaining the situation and showing them proof of purchase of your Dorico Pro license, and they may be able to help you.
I’m giving Dorico a try with Dorico Elements 5. The user manual is not user-friendly, making small tasks take HOURS to accomplish.
For example, first and second endings/repeats. Yes, I now know three ways to get the window to come up, but what do I enter there? %1 doesn’t work. 1 doesn’t work. “Enter” doesn’t work. Clicking, dragging, nothing works, and the user manual doesn’t make it clear!
Do you offer some reeeeeeeally basic tech support written by teachers, perhaps?
@Mo: You can create repeat endings using the panel on the right-hand side as well as the popover. I suggest you start in the manual here, which includes a link to a helpful video.