Finale to self-exterminate

Heads up to Finale users— Finale's publisher, MakeMusic, made this announcement yesterday:  

35 years ago, Coda Music Technologies, now MakeMusic, released the first version of Finale, blah blah blah.

Four decades is a very long time in the software industry blah blah blah.

Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry blah blah blah.

The important part: 

Effective immediately, we are announcing these changes:

• There will be no further updates to Finale, or any of its associated tools (PrintMusic, Notepad, Songwriter)
• It is no longer possible to purchase or upgrade Finale in the MakeMusic eStore
• Finale will continue to work on devices where it is currently installed (barring OS changes)

After one year, beginning August 2025, these changes will go into effect:

• It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale
• Support for Finale v27 or any other version of Finale will no longer be available

Basically, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry, because we're going to annihilate it.

You can't buy Finale any more, and in one year your ownership of Finale is terminated, as far as installing it on a new computer, or reauthorizing it on your current computer is concerned. When your current computer dies, or your current operating system dies, Finale dies, forever.  

They claim to have partnered with Dorico— to the extent that, for an unknown period of time, Dorico is offering Finale users a discount on their product. There is apparently no integration whatsoever to aid you in moving to their platform. To rescue your Finale files from oblivion, you have to use Finale to convert them to xml files, which you can then import it to Dorico, Musescore, or something else. Tick tock, people.

Converting every single thing you've ever written to xml would be a huge task, of course— I have thousands of files to convert— you'll need the Dolet Finale plugin, which has batch processing capability. You can get it through the Finale site, or through other sites. I also had to install Java (32 bit version) to install it. Then you can open you work up in the new program and see how mutilated it was in translation. 

For example, here is a page of an Elvin Jones transcription as I finished it in Finale, and how it looks when I opened the xml file in Musescore, and in Dorico SE 5 (the free version): 

Of course I don't expect the other programs to copy my original formatting exactly, but this gives you an idea of the enormity of the curation problem Finale users now face— you'll have to batch convert everything you did to this. That this is even necessary is the result of a business decision by MakeMusic. 

It would have been kinder if they made Finale open source, or abandonware, with no future updates or support. Perhaps it will be possible to install a pirated version of Finale— if it doesn't require authorizing through Finale. I don't know how that's done, whether pirated versions bypass authorization, or spoof a legal authorization. 

Now, you may be asking, if Finale did this to me after 30-some years in operation, what will stop Dorico from doing the same thing, any time after right now? 

You poor, wonderful, innocent, ridiculous person. Nothing is stopping them from doing that, they can render your work unreadable at the drop of a business decision. Clearly archival preservation of users' work is not a consideration for these businesses.  

This makes Musescore a very attractive alternative. Even if major development of it ends, it can never be wiped out this way. At least you should preserving your work in some kind of archival format as you go— print and/or pdfs, if nothing else. Frigging jpeg exports people. Anything to preserve your work in a finished state so it can be read and played by a human. 

I'll be working with Dorico and Musescore in coming weeks, and will report on my experiences. Good luck!