The Most Important Music Application of the Digital Age Is Being Shutdown Completely

Last month, recently earthquake-level uprising hit the professional music industry. On August 26, the president of Colorado-based technology company MakeMusic said the firm’s “no more updatesFinale, the pioneering and popular music notation application that the company has been selling and updating for 35 years. “Technology stacks are changing, Mac and Windows operating systems are evolving, and Finale’s millions of lines of code are converging,” MakeMusic’s Greg Dell’Era wrote in his first (and likely last) contribution to the company’s Finale-centric blog. “Instead of releasing new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we have made the decision to discontinue development.”

In other words: An essential computer program for digitizing and accelerating the arduous process of writing and formatting the types of notes that computers use. musicians and communities everywhereOrchestras, schoolchildren, the theater world, session instrumentalists, pop producers would be phased out with no hope of revival the following year. But Finale subscribers will be offered a “special” discount for upgrading to a newer vehicle called Dorico, owned by a subsidiary of historic instrument maker Yamaha.

This dry, corporate update caused a stronger reaction than Dell’Era had expected. German electronic artist and blogger Peter Kirn describes it as “end of an era.” Famous film and theater composer Marc Shaiman (When Harry Met Sally…, hair spray) expressed outrage on Instagramin a post that drew similarly angry comments from prominent artists like Tony DeSare and Joan Ellison. Final own Instagram post Hundreds of aggrieved comments have been collected from conductors, songwriters, music students, academics and general enthusiasts about the impending cut, calling the move a “total betrayal” that is “ridiculous” and “completely unacceptable”. They talked about the high costs, learning curves, and corruption of personal files that would result from having to adopt different software.

If you’re unfamiliar with Finale, you may struggle to understand why a program for placing notes on staffs would inflame such passions. The shortest way to explain its importance can come from David Pogue. CBS Sunday Morning reporter and former Broadway producerClaiming that he wouldn’t be where he is today if it wasn’t for the program. “Finale is as close to sheet music as Microsoft Word gets,” Pogue said. “If you were working with an arranger or conductor, you could say, ‘I’ll give you the Finale files,’ and you’d know they could open it.”

Pogue knows Finale intimately, having written the software’s first user manuals in the 1990s. The software itself emerged during the computer boom of the late 80s. Religious composer named Phil FarrandThe person who refused to talk to me for this piece was looking for a tool for music transcription and editing to speed up a tedious task that, at the time, could really only be done by hand and on paper. (Other more basic music applications available on the Macintosh, such as Professional Composer And Deluxe Music Construction Setexperienced frequent disruptions, make them inadequate (Most of them are for budding creators.) Farrand teamed up with John Borowicz of Coda Music Management (the company now known as MakeMusic) to develop and release Finale in 1988, attempting to market a much more complex, expensive product. their capabilities far exceeded those of their rivals: Allows users to write arrangements with dozens of instruments, listen to live audio recordings of their own creations, and access a wide variety of musical symbols (including dynamics and rests).

No matter how strong Finale was, it lacked a feature that attracted the attention of its competitors: ease of use. “The finale was surprisingly complex. “It came with hundreds of pages of manuals filled with weird jargon that no musician would understand,” said Pogue, who reviewed an early version of the app. Mac Street MagazineA New York-based newsletter for Apple enthusiasts. “It had to be complex because it was doing 100 more things than previous shows.” Pogue began helping other Finale users in New York as a salesman at the legendary Sam Ash music store (Which one is closed? just earlier this year) and submitted a proposal to Coda to simplify Finale and its manuals. The company agreed, and Pogue helped produce both the second version of Finale (“what I’ve written to date is part of the Help system”) and the three-volume manual that accompanied it, creating an overall much more readable, accessible system.

The Grammy-nominated big band composer had this easier-to-understand but no less competent iteration of the Finale. Darcy James Controversy I encountered it when I was a music student at McGill University in the mid-1990s. “I have used Finale to produce every arrangement and composition I have written since then,” Argue said. “It’s like playing an instrument. “It’s really part of my workflow, my muscle memory.” Around the same time, British coders and composers rival notation platform Called Sibelius (named after the late Romantic period) Finnish composer Jean Sibelius) did not appear on American computers until the late 90s. Both became industry standards for digital music notation throughout the 2000s, ushering in regular updates and creating a sort of “duopoly” in the field, as Dorico’s product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury described to me.

Things changed over the next decade. A. private equity firm It acquired Finale’s parent company in 2013; this was a moment that Spreadbury described as a “turning point” for MakeMusic’s business model; A business model that focuses on cloud services rather than prioritizing an already aging service like Finale. Around the same time, Sibelius’ parent company closed the platform’s London studio and fired its original developersNewer soldiers are being brought in to replace them. By then, other notation applications, such as the free, open-source MuseScore program, had begun to enter the market, throwing the Finale-Sibelius dynamic off course and allowing many of Sibelius’ now-fired developers (including Spreadbury) to thrive. Their own alternative: Dorico, a signature music notation app from German music technology company Steinberg.

In the face of more, newer, and cheaper options, Finale has been unable to maintain its unique dominance in the music sheet space. But Argue, who appreciates the platform’s openness to user-coded third-party additions, told me it maintains a loyal base of “power users.” “There isn’t the same DIY community around Dorico or Sibelius,” he said. “I designed the default jazz font included in the latest version of Finale and added compatibility for music icon fonts in the Standard Music Font Layout.” (Meanwhile, originally created Prepared by Spreadbury for use on Dorico.) Finale was also boosted by its position as a market leader in everything from know-how to file formats and an early default position for several music institutions. “Finale has been widely used in colleges and universities across the United States,” Spreadbury said, while Argue added: “Virtually every Broadway show since 1994 has been produced in Finale, along with numerous movie soundtracks.”

So why undermine the Finale now, especially when there are so many famous works whose digital versions are best suited for the Finale? The commercial problems Finale faced during its private equity period were undoubtedly part of this. But there’s also the fact that it’s a nearly 40-year-old piece of software that Pogue says “has become what they call it.” spaghetti code”—that is, a complex, poorly structured skeleton that has been modified many times over the years by many people. “It certainly would be possible remove the engine and replace it with a new one. “It would be really expensive and time consuming.”

Finale has long been in a unique position in that it came to the public at an ideal time—during the mass adoption of desktop computers and just after the trial and testing of more primitive music applications—and has held its own among upstart competitors for decades. They were able to more easily adapt their functions to less bulky hardware. “Every program is a product of the decades we live in, and it’s hard for a product to step outside of that,” Spreadbury said. “The finale was focused on the mouse. Sibelius had a large window floating on your screen and controlled by your keyboard. Dorico was designed to be used on a laptop.”

So what should you do if you’re dead set on Finale or want to find a viable pass as quickly as possible? The good news is that MakeMusic seems sensitive to this anger and is slowly changing things to make the transition from Finale easier. Just a day after it was first announced, Greg Dell’Era issued a statement in response to the question: “feedbackthat various Finale functions will remain operational throughout the next year, that the latest version of Finale will be included with the purchase of Dorico, and that users will have free access to resources, including getting started videos, to help them get used to Dorico, long FAQand almost two hour webinar Dorico went live last week. American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers “Final of the Final” enlists experienced notation experts from different genres (Broadway, Nashville, jazz) to help address questions and concerns about the change.

To avoid the deletion in Finale usability that could result from future Windows and Mac software updates, Argue recommends “sticking to an older computer and an older operating system” as a sort of “Finale PC forever—the cheapest Mac Mini I could find.” I hope the hard drive doesn’t fail and the processor continues to work.” All of the people I spoke to asked for your music file formats. MusicXMLConvert them into files that can be played with other tools, or export them as PDFs for a permanent record of your music. Pogue and Argue also independently expressed their approval of Dorico and how they handled the Finals transition. “Dorico is not completely perfect if you have extremely strange things like harp notation or complex percussion notes. “You may need to adjust these manually after switching to the new system,” Pogue said. “But simple things like vocal choruses and orchestras, those will come through clearly.”

Of course, Pogue added sadly, there will inevitably be the kind of mass cultural loss that affects people any old piece of creative software: “I have hundreds of Finale files for all the songs I’ve written, all the arrangements I’ve made, all the shows I’ve worked on. “I can still open them, and I will for years, but there will come a point when they won’t be able to open anymore.”