Also, two good pieces of advice: export all you have into MusixXML format (Finale has a bulk exporter) and keep a really clean PDF of everything you have. With the combination of the two, you can re-invigorate in Dorico.
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Double Bass The end of Finale
- Thread starter oren
- Start date
@Anne Millington: good advice.
I have had something similar happen to this in my technical professional domains and it taught me a valuable lesson - that one needs to deal with the platform migration asap. Both Adobe's switch to a (much more expensive!) subscription system and Perkin Elmer's acquisition of Cambridge Scientific's chemical structure editing programs (and a resulting cost increase of 10X) have cost me many scores of hours of downtime and frustration as I sought alternatives and learned new applications or abandoned using software all together. I'm quite disappointed that I have to now interrupt my busy life to do this once again, and in a major way for something that I use quite a bit.
So I immediately bought Dorico Pro a few days ago and went through the nonobvious installation process (that is to me; it requires separate apps to both authorize your license and handle the maintenance of the downloaded files) which when I got them underway, worked just fine, however, It was not at all obvious that I needed the download administrator app until I did some reading on the web and then went and looked for it. Unlike what the help said, no links to this app were provided in any of my registration emails.
Once underway, and with a quick tutorial of some of the different manipulation paradigms, I can see that when I become more fluent at this, Dorico will definitely be faster and better for many things than was Finale. So I tried a quick conversion of my "bass template.musx" file, the file from which I start every one of my transcriptions and was immediately confronted with some challenges. The .xml export format is not supported in exactly the same way between Finale and Dorico. For me, the export process did not generate final usable files...I'm going to need to reformat every last one of them as formatting of the .xml's seem to differ between the programs. I also recommend printing pdfs of all of your files long with the transfers.
Good luck all.
I have had something similar happen to this in my technical professional domains and it taught me a valuable lesson - that one needs to deal with the platform migration asap. Both Adobe's switch to a (much more expensive!) subscription system and Perkin Elmer's acquisition of Cambridge Scientific's chemical structure editing programs (and a resulting cost increase of 10X) have cost me many scores of hours of downtime and frustration as I sought alternatives and learned new applications or abandoned using software all together. I'm quite disappointed that I have to now interrupt my busy life to do this once again, and in a major way for something that I use quite a bit.
So I immediately bought Dorico Pro a few days ago and went through the nonobvious installation process (that is to me; it requires separate apps to both authorize your license and handle the maintenance of the downloaded files) which when I got them underway, worked just fine, however, It was not at all obvious that I needed the download administrator app until I did some reading on the web and then went and looked for it. Unlike what the help said, no links to this app were provided in any of my registration emails.
Once underway, and with a quick tutorial of some of the different manipulation paradigms, I can see that when I become more fluent at this, Dorico will definitely be faster and better for many things than was Finale. So I tried a quick conversion of my "bass template.musx" file, the file from which I start every one of my transcriptions and was immediately confronted with some challenges. The .xml export format is not supported in exactly the same way between Finale and Dorico. For me, the export process did not generate final usable files...I'm going to need to reformat every last one of them as formatting of the .xml's seem to differ between the programs. I also recommend printing pdfs of all of your files long with the transfers.
Good luck all.
Sounds like kind of a pain. Just curious if the folks looking forward to spending more money and going through the registration process described above have tried the previously discussed MuseScore. It's free, absolutely legal, easy to install, and really works well.
Quick (obvious) tutorial on importing Finale files to MuseScore...
Invalid Link Removed
...and a tutorial on doing cleanups of imported MusicXML files in MuseScore, a bit more in-depth....
Cleaning up MusicXML files
I get that we're not all alike, have different preferences, and that some real power users may find certain specific options and features in given notation programs indispensable, but if you HAVEN'T tried MuseScore, it really is worth a look. As I said earlier, I'm a fairly experienced Sibelius user, and I haven't found a single thing I can't do well with MuseScore that I used to do with Sibelius.
Of course, you can't deduct "free" from your business expenses, so I guess that could be one drawback.
Quick (obvious) tutorial on importing Finale files to MuseScore...
Invalid Link Removed
...and a tutorial on doing cleanups of imported MusicXML files in MuseScore, a bit more in-depth....
Cleaning up MusicXML files
I get that we're not all alike, have different preferences, and that some real power users may find certain specific options and features in given notation programs indispensable, but if you HAVEN'T tried MuseScore, it really is worth a look. As I said earlier, I'm a fairly experienced Sibelius user, and I haven't found a single thing I can't do well with MuseScore that I used to do with Sibelius.
Of course, you can't deduct "free" from your business expenses, so I guess that could be one drawback.
Well said, and I agree. After watching a short video on Dorico SE (the free version which I will be downloading), it's clear that it is (as you said) more highly developed than Finale ever was. As long as my exported MusicXML files come over seamlessly, I'll be happy. It doesn't look like the learning curve for Dorico is too steep as it seems fairly intuitive from what I can tell.
After watching some Dorico videos, I had some PTSD flashbacks from when I previously used Cubase. Steinberg makes authorizing their software such a hassle, even the free version! When my recording interface stopped being recognized by Cubase, I was happy to move to Studio One. I'll be checking out MuseScore instead.
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Seamlessly? Sadly, no. I tried with one finished score I had this morning, and it was not perfect. But really not bad, as the discrepancies were more to do with inclusion and placement of text elements, like title and composer. Maybe a template and global copy and paste works better? That's what I do for a transaction I have to do a lot of: 2014>v27 transfer, which is pretty rocky using native utilities.
At least the bulk of my Finale work on these files won't be lost forever. I am hoping that the tweaks I need to apply in Dorico to do all the finishing touches will be somewhat logical and intuitive. I would hate to try to do the same were the situation reversed.
And I totally agree re the installer. I have no idea why it has to be so bloody opaque. And it almost locked me out of my account for a while, which is beyond infuriating. Nobody on earth wants to hack my account so for heavens' sake, don't lock it, right? But I got past that, and will start from the beginning doing tutorials, etc. to get up to speed.
I think MuseScore is attractive and looks very clean. I've tried it out, but never really put it to the test. Others have said it is limited compared to Finale and Dorico, but since I am only writing for strings, my requirements are few. These things are all to be revealed!
I fully share your "relationship" with AVID (Avarice), but Sibelius, in addition to containing many years of my compositions, is (for me) a good notation program as long as Avid is not called on to deal with "issues". Avid is the bottom of the food chain, below toxic alga.
Steven
Steven
Checking out the Dorico training vids, it definitely looks like an improvement over Finale but I'm curious about MuseScore too. I know it's open source and relatively new. Can anyone provide more info about what functionality it lacks that I'd miss? I mostly do leadsheets, jazz charts, some lyrics.
I've been told too many times to count, "oh yes, you'll be able to seamlessly import your files and open them and it'll be all unicorns and daisies and puppies". And EVERY SINGLE TIME the files come in garbled and it takes twice as long to clean them up as it would have to just start over.
These are software-sales-people lies. Like "The check's in the mail" or "I'll still respect you in the morning." But they're lies.
Concerning the functionality of Musescore, I do not see what you could possibly miss. You can do complete big band scores with very convincing layout.
So if your intention is to write leadsheets, with or without lyrics, that is really more than what you may possibly need.
I feel your pain. I'm also dependent on a commercial software package, that costs about $7500 per year. And the headache of upgrading is now an annual headache because it's sold by subscription.
This is one reason why I'm such an advocate of the open source software movement. In fact, I will no longer waste time or brain cells learning to use software that someone else owns.
Who would use free software? Well, the entire Internet is built on top of free software. Virtually all commercial software is built using free software too. I've noticed an interesting thing: Disciplines that use mostly free software (programming, machine learning, data science) are flourishing, and disciplines built on proprietary software are stagnating, or are at least growing more slowly.
I haven't seen anyone promise seamless transfer of files. I think that is aspirational only. But I was not unhappy with my results of exporting the score from Finale and importing into Dorico. Again, my scores are fairly simple, but a lot was really nicely preserved, and I think I can work with it moving forward.
I have always been reluctant to learn some of the more arcane Finale operations, because they are so idiosyncratic and unintuitive. I hope Dorico is different.
A couple of help sources in addition to the Facebook Finale Powerusers Group:
There is a Facebook group named Learning Dorico for Finale Refugees which is helpful.
Also the Finale Forum Finale Music Notation Support | Finale Forum is quite active right now.
These don't replace just trying to recreate a piece in Dorico, tutorials in hand, so to speak. But the people on these sites are tremendously generous with their time and expertise. There is a lot of help out there for us.
There is a Facebook group named Learning Dorico for Finale Refugees which is helpful.
Also the Finale Forum Finale Music Notation Support | Finale Forum is quite active right now.
These don't replace just trying to recreate a piece in Dorico, tutorials in hand, so to speak. But the people on these sites are tremendously generous with their time and expertise. There is a lot of help out there for us.
Gonna push back a bit on the free thing. Muse Group has big investor backing which has allowed them to acquire several different things - Hal Leonard being the biggest of them. Musescore may be open source, but I think the long term goal of the company is to shut out the competition by offering unbeatable prices. It's ultimately not good for consumers if we support this race to the bottom. Finale is the first of the big ones, what happens if/when we lose more?
That's the very issue on which I'm going back and forth. Since I'd be downloading the free version of Dorico, I wouldn't technically be supporting them. And what's to keep Steinberg from making me purchase a licensed copy down the road? If I like a product, I'm okay with paying for it. Regarding open-source programs, what happens when there are only a few people willing to put in the time to write the code?
Well, then, you need to endure a few CAD system changeovers. Last one we had caused three guys to retire.
I started with the free version of Dorico, and once I started using decided that I liked it well enough to purchase the full version. I think it is written and being maintained by a good and talented group of people who are listening to their customers, and that is worth supporting with my money. That, of course, doesn't mean that at some point in the future it won't be that way, but such is the way of the world.
The above is exactly my fear. I've seen this several times in my career. This thread is turning into an interesting freeware vs. commercial software discussion. There are definitely problems with both choices with respect to guaranteed longevity as well support etc. I'm a big user of both depending upon the situation, both in my straight job and my music. Context is important.
Having said that, I tried importing some of my .xml files into MuseScore and the results were much better than Dorico. The files were immediately usable. So here's what I'm going to do:
I like the control that Dorico (and Finale) gave you over the appearance of the music on the page. I grew up reading 19 century engravings of baroque music and I can't get past some things. However, I'm keeping a copy of MuseScore handy as I converted all of my .mus and .musx files to .xml files. If I really need one edited in a hurry, then I'm covered.
Again, good luck all.
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