The most important music app of the digital age is shutting down for good

Last month, an earthquake-level shock occurred in the professional music industry. On August 26, the CEO of Colorado-based technology company MakeMusic announced that the company “will not be making further updates” to Finale, the pioneering and popular sheet music app that the company has been selling and updating for 35 years. “Technology changes, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale’s millions of lines of code add up,” wrote MakeMusic’s Greg Dell’Era in his first (and likely last) blog post for the company on Finale. “Rather than release new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we have made the decision to end its development.”

In other words: a key computer program for digitizing and speeding up the tedious process of writing and formatting the types of sheet music used by musicians and bands around the world – orchestras, school children, the theater world, session instrumentalists, pop producers – would be retired by the next year, with no hope of rebirth. However, Finale subscribers will receive an “exclusive” discount to upgrade to a newer tool called Dorico, which is owned by a subsidiary of historic instrument maker Yamaha.

This dry, corporate update caused a stronger reaction than Dell’Era must have expected. German electronic artist and blogger Peter Kirn considered it “the end of an era”. Famous film and theater composer Marc Shaiman (When Harry Met Sally…, Hair spray) expressed his outrage on Instagram in a post that drew similarly outraged comments from prominent performers such as Tony DeSare and Joan Ellison. Finale’s own Instagram post regarding its impending discontinuation was met with hundreds of offended comments from conductors, songwriters, music students, scientists and enthusiasts, calling the move a “total betrayal” that was “ridiculous” and “totally unacceptable.” They cited the high costs, learning curve, and disruption to personal files that would result from having to adopt different software.

If you’re not familiar with Finale, you might have a hard time understanding why a program for placing notes on a staff has ignited such passions. The most concise way to explain its meaning may come from David Pogue, the creator Sunday Morning CBS correspondent and former Broadway producer who says he wouldn’t be where he is today if it weren’t for the show. “Finale is as close to the Microsoft Word sheet music,” Pogue said. “If you were working with an arranger or conductor, you could just say, ‘I’ll give you the Finale files,’ and you’d know they could open them.”

Pogue is very familiar with Finale, having written the first manuals for the software in the 1990s. The software itself emerged during the computer boom of the late 1980s, when religious composer Phil Farrand – who declined to talk to me about this piece – was looking for a way to transcribe and edit music to speed up a tedious task that, at the time, could only really be do it only by hand and on paper. (Other, more basic music applications available on the Macintosh, such as Professional Composer and Deluxe Music Construction Set, were often buggy, making them insufficient for most novice creators.) So Farrand partnered with John Borowicz of Coda Music Management – ​​the company now known as MakeMusic – to develop and publish Finale in 1988, pushing to market a much more complex, expensive product whose capabilities far exceeded those of the competition: enabling users to write arrangements on dozens of instruments, listen to live audio reproductions of their works, and access a wide range of musical symbols (including dynamics and rests).

While the Finale was powerful, it lacked one feature that made its rivals attractive: ease of use. “The finale was astonishingly complicated. It contained hundreds of pages of instructions filled with bizarre jargon that no musician could understand,” said Pogue, who reviewed an early version of the app in the Mac Street Journal, a New York newsletter for Apple enthusiasts. “It must have been complicated because it did 100 more things than any previous show.” Pogue began helping other Finale users in New York as a clerk at the legendary Sam Ash music store (which closed just earlier this year) and made a proposal to Coda to simplify Finale and its instructions. The company agreed, and Pogue helped create both the second version of Finale (“my texts are still part of the Help system”) and the accompanying three-volume manual, making the system overall much more readable and accessible.

It was this version of Finale, easier to understand but no less competent, that Grammy-nominated big band composer Darcy James Argue stumbled upon in the mid-1990s while a music student at McGill University. “For every arrangement and composition I have ever written, I have used Finale to produce,” Argue said. “It’s like playing an instrument. It’s really part of my workflow, my muscle memory. Around the same time, British programmers and composers began using a competing notation platform called Sibelius (named after the Finnish late Romantic composer Jean Sibelius), which did not appear on American computers until the late 1990s. Both became industry standards in digital music notation in the 2000s, introducing regular updates and maintaining a “duopoly” of sorts in the space, as Dorico product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury characterized it.

The situation changed in the next decade. The private equity firm bought Finale’s parent company in 2013, a moment that Spreadbury described as a “turning point” for MakeMusic’s business model – a model much more focused on cloud services than prioritizing an already outdated service like Finale. Around the same time, Sibelius’s parent company closed the platform’s London studio and fired its original developers, replacing them with newer recruits. At this time, other notation applications – such as the free, open-source MuseScore program – began to enter the market, throwing the Finale-Sibelius dynamic off course and allowing many now-layed Sibelius developers (including Spreadbury) to develop their own alternative: Dorico, a distinctive application for music notation by the German music technology company Steinberg.

Faced with more newer and cheaper options, Finale could not maintain its unique control over the musical notation space. However, it retained a loyal base of “power users,” Argue told me, who appreciated the platform’s openness to user-coded third-party add-ons. “The Dorico and Sibelius area doesn’t have the same DIY community anymore,” he said. “I designed the default jazz font that is included in the latest version of Finale and included compatibility with music symbol fonts from the standard music font layout.” (Which, by the way, was originally created by Spreadbury for use in Dorico.) Finale has also gained a boost due to its position as a market pioneer and early default to various music establishments, for everything from know-how to file formats . “Finale has been very widely used in colleges and universities across the U.S.,” Spreadbury said, with Argue adding: “Virtually every Broadway show since about 1994 has been done in Finale, along with a huge number of film soundtracks.”

So why need an ax Finale now, especially since there are so many famous works whose digital versions are best suited for, well, Finale? This was undoubtedly influenced by the business problems Finale faced in the private equity era. But there’s also the fact that this is almost 40-year-old software that, as Pogue said, “has become what they call spaghetti code”-that is, a convoluted skeleton with poor structure that has been changed many times by many people over many years. “It certainly is possible disassemble the engine and replace it with a new one. It would just be very expensive and time-consuming.”

Finale has long been in a unique position, reaching the public at the perfect time (during the mass adoption of desktop computers and just after more primitive music applications had been tried and tested) and staying in business through decades of upstart competitors that were able to adapt their features more easily to less bulky equipment. “Every show is a product of the decades we live in, and it’s hard for a product to move beyond that,” Spreadbury said. “The final was controlled with the mouse. Sibelius had a large window that floated on the screen and was controlled by a keyboard. Dorico was designed for use on a laptop.”

So what do you do if you’re a die-hard Finale fan or if you want to find a feasible change as quickly as possible? The good news is that MakeMusic seems to be sensitive to this outrage and is gradually making changes to make the transition from Finale easier. Just a day after the initial announcement, Greg Dell’Era clarified, in response to “feedback”, that several Finale features would work for the next year, that the latest version of Finale would be included with Dorico purchases, and that users would have free access to resources to help them adapt to Dorico, including introductory videos, extensive answers to frequently asked questions, and a nearly two-hour webinar that Dorico streamed live last week. The American Society of Musical Arrangers and Composers also hosted a webinar on “Finale’s Finale” that brought together experienced notation experts from various genres (Broadway, Nashville, jazz) to help answer questions and concerns about the change.

To avoid any degradation in Finale’s usability that may result from future Windows and Mac software updates, Argue recommends “keeping the older computer and the older operating system” as a sort of “forever Finale computer – the cheapest Mac Mini I could find that holds it all and hopefully the hard drive won’t fail and the processor will still work.” All of my interlocutors also recommended converting music file formats using MusicXML, turning them into files that can work with other tools, or exporting them as PDF files to ensure a permanent record of your music. Pogue and Argue have also independently expressed their approval of Dorico and how he is handling the transition to the Finale. “Dorico isn’t completely perfect if you have very strange things like harp notation or complicated drum staves. You may need to manually correct them once they are in the new system,” Pogue said. “But simple things like vocal choirs and orchestras will come out clean.”

Of course, Pogue added sadly, there will inevitably be the massive cultural loss that befalls any legacy software: “I have hundreds of Finale files with all the songs I wrote and all the arrangements I did.” I did, all the programs I worked on. I can still open them and will continue to do so for years, but there will come a point where I can no longer open them.