Finale's Finale

I was shocked to hear yesterday's news that Make Music, the "owner" of Finale, an engraving program I have been using for the past twenty-four years, is no longer supporting Finale. I understand the difficulty the company has had trying to keep up with various operating systems, and decided to take the plunge and learn to use Dorico (as the people at Finale suggested). I have known about Dorico for years, and people who use it consider it to be a superior program. Finale users were given a deeply discounted price, so I bought Dorico shortly after reading the news.

The "learning curve" is steep. There are these things called "flows" that I do not understand. They have nothing to do with my needs, so I hope to ignore them. I have tried to customize the way the program looks so that I can feel better about using it while I am using it.

Today I decided to import a piece from Finale so that I could check out the instrumental sounds in the program. My Tuba Sonata was fresh in my mind because I haven't been terribly happy with all the balances on the mp3 recording that I generated from my Finale files twelve years ago. I was able to import MXL files for all four movements quickly, but once I opened them in Dorico the playback was inconsistent. The piano part would randomly become absent from the audio playback (though it would be visible in the little blocks of color that appear in the playback window). When I could hear the piano it was either too loud or too soft. It happened with some movements, but not with others.

I could probably learn how to fix those problems eventually, but I found that the Dorico tuba "sound" to be terribly mechanical and lacking in dynamic flexibility. It was not at all like an approximation of a real tuba made from sound samples generated by real tuba players. And the piano was tinny and unexpressive.

I have come to kind of like the pianist that lives in my Finale program, and I can manipulate her to do just about anything I want. I have no clue how to manipulate the one in Dorico.

The documentation that is on the Dorico website gives diagrams of windows having to do with playback choices that don't coordinate with what I see in the program I downloaded yesterday.

Dynamics, as most musicians know, vary from instrument to instrument and register to register. When a tuba player reads a fortissimo it is a great deal louder than when a pianist reads it. A cello playing loud in the high register is far more piercing than a viola playing loud in the same register. The more I learn about music and about how instruments behave in their natural habitats, the less I trust computer-generated balances. Even in Finale I need to make sample mp3 files from adjusted duplicate notation files in order to counteract Finale's tendency to automatically play a second statement of musical material at a softer dynamic (one of my peeves about Finale).

I will continue to figure out how to manipulate physical aspects of scores in Dorico because I have the program. There seems to be a way to do most everything I need/want to notate, though the path is often clumsy and often involves scrolling down to the bottom of a menu or using paths that seem clumsy.

I believe that this program is not one designed for composers because the process of adding layers seems so very hit and miss, and while editing to get rid of wrong notes it is all too easy to get rid of right ones.

I guess that if you have the music already written on paper in its final form it would be much easier to figure out how many layers you need in each hand of a piano score, and once you get the hang of how to get from one layer to the next, input the layers as you need them. I still have far to go with this experience.

My way of coping is to do more writing on paper, and to keep using Finale 27 on my current laptop computer with its old Ventura operating system. Finale 27 will not work on the upcoming macOS 15 Sequoia operating system, so when I get a new computer, which will have Sequoia built in, I will put Dorico on it but leave Finale on my laptop, where I can use it until either my laptop or I can no longer function.