I started with Finale, moved to Sibelius, and now use Dorico. Dorico was a complete mindset shift to not think as much about the looks when entering notes, but to trust settings and use a separate engraving window when needed, but i can say now Dorico hands down blows the other two away especially if you are doing anything with larger ensembles. Hang in there it's worth it.
I agree. I also started with Finale, worked a bit with Sibelius and moved to Dorico a few months ago. Once you get your head around how Dorico works, it's by far the best of the three programs. Any new program will always have a bit of a learning curve, but it won't take you very long to adapt to how Dorico works. The only real issue with Finale no longer being supported is how to manage all of the files I've created with Finale in the past. It's going to take a long time to transfer them to Dorico.
Hi Matthew. Thanks for the video. I got the email yesterday and went through a short mourning period, but I will definitely adapt. I've been using Finale since my undergrad years in theory labs, and I've been a loyal user throughout my career. By the way, I teach Black gospel music history and performance in Northwestern's Department of Performance Studies in the School of Comm. I get a lot of Bienen students every quarter. All the best to you.
Hi Kent! so nice to see a colleague from NU on here--I currently teach music theory to undergrads, so we may have overlapping past students! we're all in this together! let me know if there are specific things you want to do in Dorico that have become 2nd nature in Finale
thanks for your video. Finale has been around for 35 years. I have used it for 34 years. I was an early adopter. I am going to keep Finale going on my MacBook Pro as long as possible, while learning and using Dorico. In the short term complex scores will still be done in Finale, simpler things can be done in Dorico. You have highlighted the key concern. How to do non-standard scores.
this has been my primary concern! I'll keep working out non-traditional notation in future tutorials. If you have specific questions about how to do certain things in Dorico, let me know!
I wrote this to Finale: Hello, pardon me for getting a little bit upset if not angry. You as a company decide for whatever reason to cease support and continuation of Finale. You then expect loyal customers of years length to first by Dorico Pro, be it at a nice discount, and then buy(!) Finale V27 so as to be able to import 100’s if not 1000’s of music files. In the light of your rather harsh decision without any warning whatsoever to kill Finale, not even allowing users the opportunity to get the latest version V27, I feel it is your duty to make V27 freely available to any Finale customer. You owe this to all Finale users for putting them in an unwanted position, costing all of them money they didn’t plan to spend like this and cutting them off the last chance to get the latest version. And not in the least for forcing loyal users to start a considerable learning curve getting to know Dorico which takes time and thus costs money. I sincerely hope you will reconsider some of your decisions and be loyal to all of your loyal Finale users. Kind regards Paul Delcour
@@ShaharHarshuv I switched to Dorico this past year and I have to say that xml file import works much better than in finale. Way less quirks and bugs. It reads and distributes all information in a smooth and organized way where nothing is overlapping or bumping into each other.
@@CurtisAllenHager So far, that has not been my experience - Dorico has been adding random beats of rests into parts, resulting in nothing lining up between the parts whenever I import XML files. I even had several measures where there were extra beats inserted into a measure. Dorico doesn't seem to like complex keyboard parts (which were easy with the layers of Finale). So... What "flavor" of XML do you use? Compressed MusicXML? MusicXML? or just plain XML? Is one better than another for transferring files into Dorico from Finale? I have 35 years (3.08gb) of music that I'm going to have to transfer over before September 2025 and, at the moment, am not too happy. I was hoping for a longer period of grace before finally chucking Finale.
I switched to Dorico after using Finale for 20+ years. There are some real challenges at first, but once you break free from the limitations that Finale imposes on you, I find it is actually closer to playing music. For example, bars and bar lines in Finale are this strong binding restriction. But music doesn’t care about bar lines, that’s just theory and musicology analyzing music. The freedom to draw bar lines when and where you choose is incredibly liberating. No more “fill bar with rests”.
I’ll say I’m not happy about the news overall. Despite knowing that this would be Finale’s fate, I had hoped that it wouldn’t happen for another 5-10 years. I’m considering making the permanent switch to Dorico but I’ve found in my limited experience with it that it was agonizingly frustrating. A lot of composers I’ve met over the years expressed the steep learning curve that Finale had but for me it was the opposite, at least for the basics. I could dive into it as a first time user and figure it out (mostly), I’ve had only the opposite experience with Dorico; though I have seen what it can do and I do believe that it is the future. Many of us will just have to adapt and get over that hurdle. You can only maintain old machines for so long.
I’ll be tinkering around inside Dorico over the next few months, so let’s hope that it turns out to be a worthy alternative! Keep me posted about your experience!
The universe is giving you a favor my friend. The sooner you learn Dorico - the better. IMO Dorico's learning curve is better than Finale's. It just makes more sense. But you need to be open minded about new ways of doing stuff since it's a bit different.
@@ShaharHarshuv The problem with being an early adopter... I have 35 years of Finale files (3.08gb) - I don't want to lose all of that work, nor am I excited about importing XML files into Dorico and then cleaning up the mess (Just began that last night, and I'm not happy with the effort to "fix" things, such as spurious rests, lost text, etc. - It's all fixable, but it takes time.) I was really hoping for some time (like a few years) to complete the transition and not the Sept. 2025 cutoff date imposed by MakeMusic.
If you need to create condensed scores, nothing comes close to Dorico. It's layout system makes full scores, parts, and whatever grouping of instruments at whatever page size a snap.
Way bad news. Yes, all we know that Finale always had been far from being “the ideal software” but we all get used to it with its lights and shadows. I must admit that the announcement got me by surprise and obviously, shocked me. I already bought Dorico using the discount and from now on I’ll start the tedious process of learning how to deal with that software. Nevertheless Finale will remain in my computers indefinitely.
I hope Dorico will close the gap with the Finale "contemporary" notation on the upcoming versions (cutaway scores, cautionary accidentals, accelerating tremolo beaming, and more note tweakability that resembles Finale). A lot of this has long been requested, but (arguably) it hasn't been a priority for the devs on the latest version because Dorico needed better playback (which now it kind of has). It's useful to have a single application to handle advanced playback requirements (certainly neither Finale nor Sibelius could keep up with it). Musescore is also great on the playback front, but it just doesn't compare with Dorico in the way it does most things (it feels like a polished version of Sibelius).
I've been using Finale for a long time and I actually hate it so much! I never switched to another program because I was in too deep in a project and didn't have the time to learn a new program. I did try a little bit of Dorico today and I think it will be much faster and smoother than Finale! So many features that had me saying, "You can't do that in Finale!"
I have been using Finale from the beginning. It does everything I need and want it to. I resent the change, as I have tried Dorico and could never figure out how to do basic things. I realize that Dorico is more "modern," but sometimes the old things work better. I am not looking forward to spending a year figuring things out rather than making music.
I don't think the learning curve will be quite so steep, it should be relatively smooth! I'm planning to make more tutorials for a variety of things so stay tuned
Being a Linux user, I use Musescore. I don't like it, but it's open source, and does run on natively on Linux. The issue in this video is the problem with proprietary software. As for Musescore I wish it was more like Inkscape, because it's hard to move notes around in Musecore, and sometimes you want to just reposition a single note, and it moves everything in the entire score. It needs a feature to lock measures, so you can lock what you don't want to change.
wait wait have you used the latest versions of musescore? Because the problems you describe are way in the past before the huge changes in recent years..
I tried Finale maybe an year ago. It looked outdated. It used to support custom notation at around v9 but it was taken off soon after that. MuseScore is fast and free (somehow). Overture is really good as well. Not a fan of the Standard Music Notation - it is awful! But the price of Dorico Pro is just bonkers!
Finale is officially discontiued, Sibilius team is dead (they were all fired and reclaimed by Dorico). If anyone need another hint - yes, Dorico is actually good.
It's not just Finale that troubles me. I'm also going to lose the JW and Patterson plug-ins and worst of all, Note Performer. I spent time during the pandemic learning Dorico and found it annoying - even the installation was a nightmare.
Read somewhere that notation programs are going to die out because musicians now days write digital and can't read music. But at the same time, the reason we can still play music from the greats is because of sheetmusic. Digital formats change all the time.
Yeah too bad I can't play music from the 20's because I don't have a record player... if only someone had digitalized this music and made it available for streaming... oh wait. And no, notation is still widely used in many application, and the technology that is supposedly making it obsolete is already long existing, so it's unlikely people will stop using it anytime soon
That may be true for pop and hip hop but I’m guessing orchestral music is still a big user of notation especially if you want a real orchestra to play it. And personally I can’t play by ear and depend on sheet music to learn songs.
This comment is complete BS. Music notation is widely used, and will continue to be into the future, by any professional musician doing film scoring, broadway musicals, wedding/corporate gigs, classical performances/composing, music education, writing music books, Jazz gigs, etc. The people who can’t read music are simply uneducated musicians, who don’t have a degree in music. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it may give them the perception that music notation is dying when it’s FAR from that.
MuseScore killed the Finale star. Anyone thinking of doing [name a task] on their computer is going to try the free option first. If it does what they need, they don't think, "Hey I should spend a chunk of money to try something different!" For most, it *will* do what they need, and for those it doesn't, few are eager enough to venture on another software that pretty much makes the same claims. That leaves a very small market for a commercial app. In this case, after perusing the feature list of Dorico, I'd be hard-pressed to find something that MuseScore isn't doing already except... run on an iPad. But then, Dorico doesn't really run on an iPad... feature after feature is either "limited" or not available on their iPad version.
And another issue with iPad is that you typically want some decent samples so you can listen to your score. This increases the complexity of delivery. StaffPad and third party vendors provide samples for StaffPad so I know it is possible. And I’m always hoping Muse Group will bring StaffPad and MuseScore together eventually.
I started with Finale, moved to Sibelius, and now use Dorico. Dorico was a complete mindset shift to not think as much about the looks when entering notes, but to trust settings and use a separate engraving window when needed, but i can say now Dorico hands down blows the other two away especially if you are doing anything with larger ensembles. Hang in there it's worth it.
I agree. I also started with Finale, worked a bit with Sibelius and moved to Dorico a few months ago. Once you get your head around how Dorico works, it's by far the best of the three programs. Any new program will always have a bit of a learning curve, but it won't take you very long to adapt to how Dorico works. The only real issue with Finale no longer being supported is how to manage all of the files I've created with Finale in the past. It's going to take a long time to transfer them to Dorico.
Hi Matthew. Thanks for the video. I got the email yesterday and went through a short mourning period, but I will definitely adapt. I've been using Finale since my undergrad years in theory labs, and I've been a loyal user throughout my career. By the way, I teach Black gospel music history and performance in Northwestern's Department of Performance Studies in the School of Comm. I get a lot of Bienen students every quarter. All the best to you.
Hi Kent! so nice to see a colleague from NU on here--I currently teach music theory to undergrads, so we may have overlapping past students! we're all in this together! let me know if there are specific things you want to do in Dorico that have become 2nd nature in Finale
thanks for your video. Finale has been around for 35 years. I have used it for 34 years. I was an early adopter. I am going to keep Finale going on my MacBook Pro as long as possible, while learning and using Dorico. In the short term complex scores will still be done in Finale, simpler things can be done in Dorico. You have highlighted the key concern. How to do non-standard scores.
this has been my primary concern! I'll keep working out non-traditional notation in future tutorials. If you have specific questions about how to do certain things in Dorico, let me know!
I wrote this to Finale:
Hello,
pardon me for getting a little bit upset if not angry.
You as a company decide for whatever reason to cease support and continuation of Finale.
You then expect loyal customers of years length to first by Dorico Pro, be it at a nice discount, and then buy(!) Finale V27 so as to be able to import 100’s if not 1000’s of music files.
In the light of your rather harsh decision without any warning whatsoever to kill Finale, not even allowing users the opportunity to get the latest version V27, I feel it is your duty to make V27 freely available to any Finale customer. You owe this to all Finale users for putting them in an unwanted position, costing all of them money they didn’t plan to spend like this and cutting them off the last chance to get the latest version.
And not in the least for forcing loyal users to start a considerable learning curve getting to know Dorico which takes time and thus costs money.
I sincerely hope you will reconsider some of your decisions and be loyal to all of your loyal Finale users.
Kind regards
Paul Delcour
There is a serious need for a software that can do a conversion between .musx files and the Dorico formats. I'm already starting to look into this
You can export and import musicxml, though some information will probably be lost
@@ShaharHarshuv I switched to Dorico this past year and I have to say that xml file import works much better than in finale. Way less quirks and bugs. It reads and distributes all information in a smooth and organized way where nothing is overlapping or bumping into each other.
@@CurtisAllenHageragreed it’s not too bad.
@@CurtisAllenHager So far, that has not been my experience - Dorico has been adding random beats of rests into parts, resulting in nothing lining up between the parts whenever I import XML files. I even had several measures where there were extra beats inserted into a measure. Dorico doesn't seem to like complex keyboard parts (which were easy with the layers of Finale). So... What "flavor" of XML do you use? Compressed MusicXML? MusicXML? or just plain XML? Is one better than another for transferring files into Dorico from Finale? I have 35 years (3.08gb) of music that I'm going to have to transfer over before September 2025 and, at the moment, am not too happy. I was hoping for a longer period of grace before finally chucking Finale.
@@ShaharHarshuv yeah, it's far from ideal at this point
I switched to Dorico after using Finale for 20+ years. There are some real challenges at first, but once you break free from the limitations that Finale imposes on you, I find it is actually closer to playing music.
For example, bars and bar lines in Finale are this strong binding restriction. But music doesn’t care about bar lines, that’s just theory and musicology analyzing music. The freedom to draw bar lines when and where you choose is incredibly liberating. No more “fill bar with rests”.
Exactly! Also the idea that tied notes are THE SAME NOTE is both brilliant and obvious.
@@ShaharHarshuv arguably, musically they were always the same note, you just had to fool your theoretical brain to share that with other people
I’ll say I’m not happy about the news overall. Despite knowing that this would be Finale’s fate, I had hoped that it wouldn’t happen for another 5-10 years. I’m considering making the permanent switch to Dorico but I’ve found in my limited experience with it that it was agonizingly frustrating. A lot of composers I’ve met over the years expressed the steep learning curve that Finale had but for me it was the opposite, at least for the basics. I could dive into it as a first time user and figure it out (mostly), I’ve had only the opposite experience with Dorico; though I have seen what it can do and I do believe that it is the future. Many of us will just have to adapt and get over that hurdle. You can only maintain old machines for so long.
I’ll be tinkering around inside Dorico over the next few months, so let’s hope that it turns out to be a worthy alternative! Keep me posted about your experience!
Do it Fantastic 2nd generation notation software
The universe is giving you a favor my friend. The sooner you learn Dorico - the better. IMO Dorico's learning curve is better than Finale's. It just makes more sense. But you need to be open minded about new ways of doing stuff since it's a bit different.
@@mathewarrellinIt is... not sure why you had to wait for Finale's discontinuation.
@@ShaharHarshuv The problem with being an early adopter... I have 35 years of Finale files (3.08gb) - I don't want to lose all of that work, nor am I excited about importing XML files into Dorico and then cleaning up the mess (Just began that last night, and I'm not happy with the effort to "fix" things, such as spurious rests, lost text, etc. - It's all fixable, but it takes time.) I was really hoping for some time (like a few years) to complete the transition and not the Sept. 2025 cutoff date imposed by MakeMusic.
If you need to create condensed scores, nothing comes close to Dorico. It's layout system makes full scores, parts, and whatever grouping of instruments at whatever page size a snap.
I tried both Dirico and Sibelius as a Finale replacement, and Sibelius is definitely better. Using Dorico is a nightmare.
Way bad news. Yes, all we know that Finale always had been far from being “the ideal software” but we all get used to it with its lights and shadows. I must admit that the announcement got me by surprise and obviously, shocked me. I already bought Dorico using the discount and from now on I’ll start the tedious process of learning how to deal with that software. Nevertheless Finale will remain in my computers indefinitely.
I hope Dorico will close the gap with the Finale "contemporary" notation on the upcoming versions (cutaway scores, cautionary accidentals, accelerating tremolo beaming, and more note tweakability that resembles Finale). A lot of this has long been requested, but (arguably) it hasn't been a priority for the devs on the latest version because Dorico needed better playback (which now it kind of has). It's useful to have a single application to handle advanced playback requirements (certainly neither Finale nor Sibelius could keep up with it). Musescore is also great on the playback front, but it just doesn't compare with Dorico in the way it does most things (it feels like a polished version of Sibelius).
Used Finale for 22 years. Dorico is a game-changer.
That sucks why would they not at the very least keep it purchaseable without support. Getting rid of it is wild.
I've been using Finale for a long time and I actually hate it so much! I never switched to another program because I was in too deep in a project and didn't have the time to learn a new program. I did try a little bit of Dorico today and I think it will be much faster and smoother than Finale! So many features that had me saying, "You can't do that in Finale!"
I had a similar experience! so far I like Dorico
I lost Dorico on my system, and am trying to get it back. Any advice? BTW, I found I could export files from Finale to MID.
THEY’D HAD BETTER MAKE IT OPEN SOURCE!
I have been using Finale from the beginning. It does everything I need and want it to. I resent the change, as I have tried Dorico and could never figure out how to do basic things. I realize that Dorico is more "modern," but sometimes the old things work better. I am not looking forward to spending a year figuring things out rather than making music.
I don't think the learning curve will be quite so steep, it should be relatively smooth! I'm planning to make more tutorials for a variety of things so stay tuned
Being a Linux user, I use Musescore. I don't like it, but it's open source, and does run on natively on Linux. The issue in this video is the problem with proprietary software. As for Musescore I wish it was more like Inkscape, because it's hard to move notes around in Musecore, and sometimes you want to just reposition a single note, and it moves everything in the entire score. It needs a feature to lock measures, so you can lock what you don't want to change.
wait wait have you used the latest versions of musescore? Because the problems you describe are way in the past before the huge changes in recent years..
Ain't Nobody Got Time for That!
Answer: Dorico or Dorico Pro
I tried Finale maybe an year ago. It looked outdated. It used to support custom notation at around v9 but it was taken off soon after that.
MuseScore is fast and free (somehow). Overture is really good as well. Not a fan of the Standard Music Notation - it is awful! But the price of Dorico Pro is just bonkers!
Finale is officially discontiued, Sibilius team is dead (they were all fired and reclaimed by Dorico). If anyone need another hint - yes, Dorico is actually good.
i tried derico...what a f--king nightmare. Musicore all the way.
Musescore got me at Free!
It's not just Finale that troubles me. I'm also going to lose the JW and Patterson plug-ins and worst of all, Note Performer. I spent time during the pandemic learning Dorico and found it annoying - even the installation was a nightmare.
Note that Dorico has gotten a lot better with the latest release
@@arnaubrichs You can use recent versions of Note Performer with Dorico.
Read somewhere that notation programs are going to die out because musicians now days write digital and can't read music. But at the same time, the reason we can still play music from the greats is because of sheetmusic. Digital formats change all the time.
Yeah too bad I can't play music from the 20's because I don't have a record player... if only someone had digitalized this music and made it available for streaming... oh wait.
And no, notation is still widely used in many application, and the technology that is supposedly making it obsolete is already long existing, so it's unlikely people will stop using it anytime soon
That may be true for pop and hip hop but I’m guessing orchestral music is still a big user of notation especially if you want a real orchestra to play it. And personally I can’t play by ear and depend on sheet music to learn songs.
This comment is complete BS. Music notation is widely used, and will continue to be into the future, by any professional musician doing film scoring, broadway musicals, wedding/corporate gigs, classical performances/composing, music education, writing music books, Jazz gigs, etc.
The people who can’t read music are simply uneducated musicians, who don’t have a degree in music. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it may give them the perception that music notation is dying when it’s FAR from that.
MuseScore killed the Finale star.
Anyone thinking of doing [name a task] on their computer is going to try the free option first.
If it does what they need, they don't think, "Hey I should spend a chunk of money to try something different!"
For most, it *will* do what they need, and for those it doesn't, few are eager enough to venture on another software that pretty much makes the same claims.
That leaves a very small market for a commercial app.
In this case, after perusing the feature list of Dorico, I'd be hard-pressed to find something that MuseScore isn't doing already except... run on an iPad.
But then, Dorico doesn't really run on an iPad... feature after feature is either "limited" or not available on their iPad version.
And another issue with iPad is that you typically want some decent samples so you can listen to your score. This increases the complexity of delivery. StaffPad and third party vendors provide samples for StaffPad so I know it is possible. And I’m always hoping Muse Group will bring StaffPad and MuseScore together eventually.
Ominous name
Dorico is amazing you’re gonna love it!
Dorico killed Finale off
For me, it seems that it was a corporate move.
Never was live. XD
MuseScore 4.4 ftw
I tried Dorico a couple of years ago and didn’t like it. I also don’t like unethical behavior, so I’m looking for another option.
Unethical behavior?