It’s the second-busiest time of the year, but there’s very little news that gets bigger than this.

In 2012, I had to do my first serious arranging project. I had found Bill Holcombe’s arrangement of Liszt’s Liebestraum #3 for tuba quintet in a jazz style. A short presentation on Animal Collective’s Cuckoo Cuckoo the previous year had led me there, and I recruited some friends to play it for Iowa’s State Solo & Small Ensemble Festival before our Winter Break. Being somewhat ignorant, though, I assumed that a tuba quintet was for five tubas, not a mixture of tubas and euphoniums – so with Bill Holcombe’s permission, I set out to arrange it down a fifth to sit in our range, rather than find a second or third euphophonist.

I had no budget, so at the time, Finale Notepad was my only option. Dorico did not exist yet, MuseScore wasn’t on my radar¹, and I don’t believe there was a free option for Sibelius, so unless I was willing to pony up more money than any high schooler would tend to, Finale NotePad was my only choice.

I thought I could do the whole project – five parts of 181 measures – all by clicking my notes in. I realized before I was part of the way through that I needed to learn the shortcuts to have any hope of ever finishing the project. I had lots of frustrations, some inherent to Finale, some inherent to the NotePad version². When I later went to college, I would eventually buy the full version of Finale. I still remember sitting in my freshman dorm as my best friend worked on jazz transcription and I did something else in Finale, and us both cursing it to the moon for one frustrating behavior or another.

When I was an undergrad, I felt like everyone used Finale except the composition students. When I took Arranging For Band, we were guided through the Sibelius tutorial, but allowed to arrange in whatever software we liked (I liked some things about Sibelius on our lab iMacs, but I couldn’t abide by its terrible shortcuts on a laptop…) and I jumped right back over to Finale. I saw a lot of arrangements of peers, and was eventually motivated to clean up some of my engraving in Finale (or to just learn the software well enough to not leave an empty bar at the end of every project – something Finale made it all too easy to do for the novice user).

As I had more and more projects where it was necessary for me to edit parts of arrange things, I got fast at Finale. If there were races for digital music copyists, I thought I could hang with any professional working with notation software. Among other things, seeing our conducting TAs working in Finale on their Macbook Pros made me envy the portability and battery life (compared to the Windows laptops I was used to) for working specifically in notation software that eventually brought me to the Mac.

Over my college career, I kept pushing my skills and understanding of Finale, but after Dorico came out, I was impressed with what I was reading, and tried it. There were a few things about it that didn’t stick for me in version 1, but when I came back to Finale, I felt dirty drawing smart shapes and going into obscure tools to make everyday changes. I realized that there were so many ‘easy’ things that were hard in Finale, and Dorico’s release was actually the reason I switched from Finale to Sibelius, funnily enough. I learned Sibelius as well (and better) than I ever knew Finale, and never really looked back, eventually moving to Dorico.

Finale announced today that it’s done.

There are lots of nerd ‘holy wars.’ Mac vs. PC, vim vs. emacs, and amongst music computer nerds, Sibelius vs. Finale was one of the hottest. For over a decade, they were really the only two options for anyone truly serious about their notation software.

Once upon a time, though, Austria was afraid of the Ottoman Empire.

Finale, by its architecture, appears to have had bigger issues with “technical debt” than Sibelius ever did. To get real nerdy with it for a second, it wasn’t using a cross-platform framework like Qt to help it manage how it interacted with the operating system. There were ways in which this was actually a benefit, but it was harder to maintin. The headlining feature of Finale 25 (in 2016) was 64-bit support, which took considerable resources for little apparent benefit for users.

As Finale’s progress slowed and competition from Dorico made the professional space a three-way race, the free MuseScore made great strides in refinement and became the ‘default’ for a new generation of people using their first scoring software.

I have very mixed feelings about all of this. If I sound like I’m gloating in any of this, I don’t mean to. Had I never bought Finale, I likely would have a completely different relationship with all technology in my life. But I also can’t open Finale without reliving lots and lots of frustration that is years in the past. While I got much better results by learning the program more, design is how it works. The problems people ran into and created for themselves in Finale are a byproduct of how well the software set them up to do a complicated job that most people don’t know the rules of. But it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen issues arising from amateur results in Finale; Musescore is producing those efforts today.

So I’m a bit misty-eyed in all of this I guess. I have a good number of .musx files I never converted to MusicXML because I always thought I could buy Finale when I finally wanted to get around to it. While I have my complaints and gripes with it, it’s weird to think that we live in a world without Finale now.

As always, Scoring Notes kills it with the coverage. I can’t wait to read Philip’s history section.