After sunset: your path from Finale to Dorico

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.

Get your crossgrade now

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.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoyaeouPUsds4tcAcLTR1lrrvloMkGPo_

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.