The End of Finale
finalemusic.com
finalemusic.com
Well that seems like a dick move.
> MakeMusic has partnered with Steinberg to offer an exclusive discount on Dorico Pro.
So can we assume MakeMusic is getting a kickback for every sale of Dorico? If that's the case, of course they're going to stop you from reinstalling Finale.
This isn’t some kind of massive win for MakeMusic, nor is it greed if they get a little money for moving people to another product. They’re shutting down what once was their flagship product. There’s more competition now, the codebase is heavy with legacy cruft, maybe it’s no fun at all to work on, or maybe they’re losing customers and are unable to make a living on Finale. It’s hard and painful to shut down a once-successful project, especially for people who’ve worked hard on it for a long time. I can’t help but empathize a little.
It could be way worse, they could be shutting down new authorizations today. Companies and products that die do that all the time. Giving the customers a year to deal with it and a steeply discounted upgrade path is relatively kind.
So they chopped off your finger, it could be worse they could have taken the whole hand!
The right thing to do is release a version that doesn't require authorization at all.
Number 1: this is not a cloud-based product, it works entirely off-line, so saying that the product ceases to exist is also wrong, I and many others archive the installers to re-install them on new computers.
Number 2: Microsoft prides itself on backwards compatibility, and it is very common to run software that is decades-old on new versions of windows.
Number 3: It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale. This is the point that is angering people. I paid for a very specific version of Finale, and it's obvious that I should continue to expect to be able to use it barring OS related incompatibility. The only reason the software won't work anymore is because they're deliberately locking my authorization key.
The correct move from the company is to either leave the server that authorizes keys on, or if that's somehow magically too much trouble, then they need to patch older versions of finale to not check for the key.
Source: Have been using Finale for decades
I might indeed be wrong (about what I’m not exactly sure yet despite your comment), but I think you maybe misunderstood my comment a little bit. I didn’t say the software will cease to exist, but the product actually went on life support yesterday and will cease to exist in a year. You can’t buy it, and support ends in 1 year. After that it no longer exists as a product. That’s not my opinion, it’s what the letter says.
It’s understandable to be upset about the new authorization cutoff. That might not be MakeMusic’s decision, it might be Steinberg’s. The move to Dorico and the discount on offer might be valuable and viable for a lot of people, but I have no doubt that it probably doesn’t work for everyone, and in that case the authorization shut-off hurts more.
But, new authorization isn’t going to help much beyond a year anyway, right? With the product dying, if you haven’t moved to something else by then, it’s just playing Russian Roulette. I’ve watched loads of Windows software become incompatible, software much younger than Finale, despite your point #2. I tried installing audio drivers for my Edirol audio interface just yesterday, and it no longer works. It sucks when software products you depend on go away, but unfortunately, people sometimes run out of money.
I've been a Windows sysadmin since the late 90s. This has not ever been my experience with productivity software. Games and hardware drivers can be problematic, for sure, but productivity software by-and-large can be made to work fine on newer versions of Windows.
> It sucks when software products you depend on go away...
It's not "going away"-- it's being taken away. That's the issue people are having with it.
Bits don't rot. Locally-installed software doesn't "wear out". (Yes, yes-- you need to employ different security paradigms and compensating controls with "out of date" software in light of vulnerabilities. That's still not the software "wearing out".)
It's deeply saddening anyone would just accept perpetually-licensed use rights for locally-installed software being revoked after-the-fact. This should be the the purview of consumer protection regulation, not resignation that the world just works that way.
And I've seen a resurgence of old software running with very compatible PC emulators and older versions of Windows still installable. In theory, this software could run forever just like my copy of Oregon Trail.
It is available as a Windows app right? It takes a lot for Microsoft to make their OS be incompatible with apps.
For example, the entire Audacity Google Analytics debacle, and how he basically insulted the entire community when there was an outrage over GA being silently added.
MuseScore I'm less familiar with but I do recall people being upset about how some of that went down, too.
Yes, questionable stuff was added to Musescore since he joined. I'm particularly not too happy about their push for their Musescore.com cloud in the UI, the proprietary (optional) audio rendering bit, and the proprietary "update manager" in the binaries they distribute. Is he the one who pushed those things though? (Maybe, I don't know. But I doubt it. Those things are mostly business decisions, he is a UX designer).
Musescore also massively improved since he joined. It is a massively better software than before.
But I don't see the connection with the current discussion? We are not talking about Musescore, the Muse or Tantacrul, are we? We are talking about Finale.
Yeah, this doesn't smell like a typical financial or strategic move. My guess would be that this is a team that really cared about the product domain to recommend a competitor going forward but also came to recognize retirement needs among their codebase and/or the team itself.
How do you know they’re not offering compensation to people who purchased recently? What compensation do you expect, and under what circumstances?
(* edit to add link to the refund offer: https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/258438881308...)
Like I said, I’m comparing the extra year to situations where products shut down immediately without an extra year. You would agree that having an extra year is better than not, wouldn’t you?
What do you actually want? Do you need to convert your Finale library? By nearly all accounts, Dorico’s a massive UX upgrade and being offered at a 75% discount. I haven’t used it, but I just don’t understand why the pitchforks are out, especially when I’m not hearing many personal stories in this thread, so that makes it seem like bystander outrage where the bystanders aren’t invested.
I agree. So does MakeMusic, I guess, which is why they have at least a 30 day refund, and a whole year before new install authorizations end. I feel like I’m being misunderstood and misquoted and you’re arguing against things I didn’t say. I agree that losing access to new installs of Finale after a year sucks. I understand why paid users are angry. I assume the no re-auth after a year part could be a non-compete stipulation in their agreement with Steinberg. If most current Finale users value the ~$450 Dorico discount, maybe it’s worth the blowback, otherwise, maybe not.
For MakeMusic, I don’t know, but whether it benefits the most Finale users may be the entire point from their perspective. And it might matter to the users too, even if it doesn’t matter to you. The dev’s principles might prioritize maximum benefit for the most users over the anger that shutting off the auth server could potentially lead to. They are offering a tradeoff for which there is no perfect solution for everyone. Leaving the auth server on but not offering a Dorico discount might be overall significantly less good than what they did, even if what they did isn’t perfect or agreeable by your standards. That possibility is interesting and worth considering to me, even if not to you.
"We just stopped support for your Silverado. You can drive it for one more year, then we're coming to take it out of your garage. We have a deal with Ford for you to get an F-150 with a discount."
"It could be way worse, at least I get to use it for another year, I hope they're getting a kickback from Ford."
Assuming you have a vested interest in the outcome here, what do you actually want to have happen to Finale that’s realistic for MakeMusic? What would you have done if it was your business? Have you ever had a business and had to plan the shut down a product people had paid for? Please actually consider those questions carefully.
Sometimes businesses lose. You can’t force a business to make a profit or to sell something they don’t want to sell or can no longer make. There’s no good way to shut down a product. And there’s no product ever that has ceased that didn’t have buyers right before they stopped taking money.
It’s a fact that it could be worse, and I already explained why, because often it actually is worse, especially with tech companies.
And yes, I hope the devs at MakeMusic are okay. I don’t understand why internet commenters wouldn’t, especially if they’re Finale fans.
It's this library archival stranding that is driving a lot of outrage from some quarters, especially if you're misreading the announcement, as noted above.
I guess you can call it stealing if you want. The word steal has many figurative meanings, such as ‘you stole my heart’. When a product fails, yes it eventually becomes impossible to use, even when you paid for it. To me it seems like misleading and hyperbole to call it stealing because you’re implicitly assigning malice to the business that simply failed, because they failed and aren’t getting value from the software becoming EOL, because they’re offering refunds to people who paid recently and haven’t had time to get value.
Do you call all products and business that fail or go out of business “stealing”?
If you read the letter and FAQ in their entirety, you will see they are not making it impossible to continue to use Finale. Customers who paid can continue to use it, for as long as their computer works. They are turning off new activations on new machines, in a year from now. It’s hard to imagine that mattering very much in the face of the facts that Finale is now dead, cannot be purchased, and is going to be obsolete eventually due to incompatible OS changes no matter what. But if you depend on Finale enough to not upgrade your computer, you can continue to use Finale as long as you want.
It's one thing if I buy a tool and it breaks down naturally. That does happen... in the physical world. It should NEVER happen in the software world, not for a standalone tool. If a company that sold you the tool (which you expected to use indefinitely) then goes out of their way to make sure you can't keep using that tool, then yeah, that's stealing.
Actually, it's not stealing. It's sabotage.
(And yes, they are making it nearly impossible to keep using finale. Unlike software, computers do break down. Or sometimes Microsoft forces everyone to get a new computer, as it seems will happen next year with the forced obsolescence of Windows 10 and forced move to Windows 11.)
As you point out, it’s Microsoft or Apple forcing you to upgrade. Why are you blaming MakeMusic for that? If you don’t upgrade, then your currently running copy of Finale will continue working. It’s completely unrealistic for most people to not upgrade, but still, it’s not MakeMusic’s fault that people upgrade.
No-one is attacking MakeMusic for discontinuing their product, yet you continue to assert this.
People are attacking MakeMusic for removing a way that you can continue to use their product as long as there are no technical limitations preventing you. No-one is saying "Oh, it needs to support Windows 14 and macOS 18". They are saying "there is nothing wrong with the software I purchased, nor the hardware I wish to run it on. You are just arbitrarily preventing me from doing so".
They don't have to keep activation servers running. Create a patch that disables the online activation requirement. Done.
It sucks if people expected authorization would continue to work forever. How many people would actually use that if it existed, and what is a reasonable user base threshold below which they can turn it off? It doesn’t matter what I think, but I don’t think leaving the auth servers on is going to benefit more than a very tiny handful of people at most, and thus probably isn’t worth the effort. And again, it’s entirely possible this is all coming at Steinberg’s request and was deemed an acceptable tradeoff by MakeMusic, assuming that it would benefit more people than it would harm. The discount vs activation tradeoff very well might benefit more people than it harms.
Personally, having run a software business, and having known others who’ve run software businesses, I see failed businesses, failed products, and company acquisitions all under the same umbrella of causing real problems against the expectations of buyers. All of those situations cause changes to the EULA, and people don’t like change, especially when they’ve paid money for constancy, I can completely and totally understand that. I was just trying to calm the pitchforking down a little… and not doing that great of a job, obviously.
If MakeMusic is offering the Dorico discount in return for no competition via turning off the auth servers, in a way that’s almost like Steinberg acquiring Finale but killing it. Maybe that could have happened, and maybe this way was cheaper and less legal paperwork for both parties, I dunno. Nobody else here does either.
You say this, but of the composers who haven't moved to Dorico by now, they're probably very set in their ways. So I'm not sure "very tiny handful" is accurate.
I don't actually think they should be required to maintain auth servers, hence the patch.
> And again, it’s entirely possible this is all coming at Steinberg’s request and was deemed an acceptable tradeoff by MakeMusic
I still have no idea why this relevant or appropriate. "Hey, we might have been willing to continue to "allow" you to use the software you know, you bought, but another agreement sounded more appealing to us". That would actually be pushing on the concept of tortious interference (where a third party induces a first party to renege on their agreement with a second).
> And again, it’s entirely possible this is all coming at Steinberg’s request and was deemed an acceptable tradeoff by MakeMusic, assuming that it would benefit more people than it would harm. The discount vs activation tradeoff very well might benefit more people than it harms.
Entirely so. And maybe for some, the financial aspect is what's holding them back. But to be clear, Finale itself has been several hundred dollars (I believe I paid $299), so I don't know that that was the distinction for some.
Also, there is the removal of choice. "We're turning off the activation servers. You can pay $179 to some other company, or lose access to the software you'd already paid for". I don't know that your "oh you're not losing it, because you can keep running it, if it's already activated" is anywhere near the argument you think it is.
Fair point, maybe more people will be caught than I think. I do know a composer that hasn’t moved yet, and he is pretty set in his ways.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that the whole reason Finale is shutting down is because the user base is already too small. And, even people set in their ways are now being notified that Finale is going away, which is news, so a lot of the people still left will certainly move before the year is out, right? We’re both speculating on how many will be left and whether we can subjectively call that many or few, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to estimate those still left in a year from now will not be the majority of the user base they had last week.
I agree with you that suggesting people can continue to run Finale is a weak argument. If you look, you might notice I’ve actually argued that it’s pretty unrealistic for most people and probably not going to work for long. I only corrected people who’ve incorrectly claimed or implied they would lose any and all access, and I only did that because that’s what the Finale FAQ says and I assume people are getting angry before reading and understanding the entire situation. People have a year to install Finale on a new computer, and if it’s really super important they can setup a machine that won’t get upgrades or other applications on it, and Finale might continue to work for longer than a year. That’s still unrealistic and I neither expect nor encourage it, but it is an option, should someone sufficiently motivated want to take it. Seems better to me to take the Dorico discount or explore MuseScore or Sibelius or something else and not waste time wishing Finale would continue to run.
(Artists get very attached to their tools: this happens with physical objects as well, where e.g. it's very common for an artist to have hoarded up a very large stock of their favourite pen/pencil/brush because it was discontinued. Not an option with software that's had its auth servers turned off)
I have plenty of products from companies that go out of business. Some of them even have servers that they depend on. At least one of the companies did the right thing and allowed their physical hardware product to continue to be used by people running their own servers.
It's not rocket science. It's should be the right and moral thing to do. Are they legally required to do it? No. Should they be? Probably yes.
I guess if you're really really really young and all you know is subscription based software, then that is the world you know and you might just be accustomed to it and accept it.
But if Finale has been around for 35 years, then it existed long before "cloud" and long before subscription software was a thing.
If someone has invested money and time into using that software, into creating project files that only work with it, in learning how to use that then it is not remotely acceptable in my opinion to disable their access to something that they have paid for and invested in. I don't think that "stealing" is an inappropriate word to use in that case. Not even a little bit of hyperbole.
Does that mean that MakeMusic should continue to invest their own resources into maintaining it? Absolutely not. To answer your question: "what do you actually want to have happen to Finale that’s realistic for MakeMusic?": I would suggest that they allow people who have paid for it to continue to use it indefinitely.
This might mean that they need to release a patched version that's not going to activate remotely through their servers with a download link that will eventually expire.
I acknowledge that that doesn't cost them "absolutely nothing" but it's not a major expense (also happens to be a fixed cost) and it prevents them from being akin to your fridge manufacturer saying "we are discontinuing this model, as well as repair services for this model, therefore we are going to enter your house and physically remove your fridge one year from now so that you will be forever unable to use the thing that you paid us money for." What they get in return for this one time "end of life" service for their paying customers is customer retention and good will. I mean, I know that I will never consider buying anything from MakeMusic as a result of hearing that they might shut off my access to things I bought and paid for at any time.
> it’s not a major expense (also happens to be a fixed cost)
That’s unlikely to be true, and not anyone’s decision but MakeMusic’s. What if they don’t have the money? It’s not reasonable for me to ask you to pay me $10 on the grounds that it’s not a major expense and is a fixed cost, right?
FALSE.
From the announcement, "It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale".
If I have to reinstall it for any reason, such as my computer dying, or I get a virus, or I upgrade my computer, or any myriad of reasons, I am completely SOL and can no longer "continue to use it indefinitely".
https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/258438881308...
“Will my software continue to function?
Yes! Your existing authorized Finale installations will continue to work as long as your current computer is working.”
BTW, I did make the mistake of saying ‘forever’ in another comment, but FWIW ‘indefinitely’ doesn’t mean forever. Also, it doesn’t matter what I say, I don’t work for MakeMusic, just read the whole FAQ.
You just really like arguing for the sake of arguing don't you?
I'm sure that if I opened a dictionary I would find the distinction, but most people treat the words 'indefinitely' and 'forever' as synonymous. Nit-picking on that minutia kind of makes you come across like the obnoxious little brother who does the "But I'm not touching you!" thing to his sister. It's just annoying and most reasonable people know exactly how 'indefinitely' and 'forever' will be interpreted.
This doesn't seem dumb to you?
It’s a sort of glass-half-full spin, perhaps, but doesn’t seem misleading to me in light of all the FAQ entries and the letter. They are very clearly and explicitly recommending users move off of Finale asap, and not wait for the computer to stop working, whatever that might mean. If someone really truly depends on Finale professionally, and can’t move within a year, it’s not outside the bounds of possibility to freeze their computer, buy a new one for everything else, and keep Finale running for a while. I would in no way recommend that, but I’ve seen people do it before.
If they sold me that product I should be able to pop that software into a Windows 10 VM and use it till the end of time.
What you’re actually complaining about is the fact that the software was remotely authorized in the first place, starting over 3 decades ago, not that it was discontinued and will stop. It’s fine and fair to be against the idea of releasing software that requires remote authorization, I’m not arguing against that idea. But if you are, then don’t buy it in the first place. Software that is remotely authorized always comes with the risk that authorization will go away, it would be pretty silly to assume otherwise.
Consumers don't know this. This is why we need consumer protection regulation to control these practices.
You might have a point when it comes to, say, MS Windows, but not Finale.
You're radically overestimating the understanding of consumers. The target market for a product like Finale is decidedly not "IT people".
And why did you quote “IT people”, who said anything about IT people?
I'm not the person you're replying to but I interpreted what they were saying as meaning "tech savvy."
The average, non-tech-savvy user doesn't necessarily understand the concept of client/server applications let alone realize that what makes the software that they purchased work is bound to a remote server / someone else's computer that could one day disappear.
I've been following this thread and in another reply it was pointed out that Finale has a 30 day money back guarantee, that "everyone" who uses Finale knows about the remote activation mechanism and that if they discover it after purchase and do not agree they can take advantage of that 30 day money back guarantee.
I think this argument is weak.
What a user typically experiences after installing new software is a dialogue asking them to enter their email and password that was used at the time of purchasing.
What happens after that is not necessarily clear.
Does it need to send the email and password to a remote server in order to verify the license every single time the application starts, or is this a one time activation?
From the user's perspective, is it made blatantly clear that the software is asking for the information for the purpose of product activation or is it merely for personalization purposes?
For that matter, does it actually serve any functional purpose at all, or is it just annoying data collection that can't be skipped?
20 years ago, EULAs were one of the big talking points online when it came to software companies. There was a question as to whether EULAs would actually be enforceable, binding contracts that courts would recognize at all. This came up time and time again because of some of the content that these EULAs included. I can't remember any specifics, but I remember that there was some really eyebrow raising stuff in some EULAs. Regardless, it was well understood that most end users blindly clicked "I Agree" without ever reading the EULA. It was seen by most as an annoying thing that you had to do when installing software, and few understood the point or gave it a second thought.
My argument is that when it comes to product activation, most end users probably view it as similar to clicking "I Agree" on the EULA. I doubt very much that most non-tech-savvy users are really thinking about the fact that someone else's computer is going to need to be running in order to activate their software should they need to re-install or if they lose access to the Internet. And very few are thinking about the possibility that the company could go out of business or one day just decide to stop activating the software on re-installs because they feel like it.
I'm repeating some of what I've said in earlier replies of mine ... but this really comes down to contracts and by "contract" I don't necessarily mean a hand-written and signed document laying out terms, I just mean the agreement that was between the vendor and purchaser. That agreement can be complicated because you've got the EULA on the one hand, the company's marketing on the other and what a court would recognize and enforce if it were litigated.
I'm personally more concerned with the implied agreement because I doubt anyone will choose to litigate over this (unless there is an institution somewhere that invested a lot of money in Finale and expected to be able to use the software in perpetuity). The implied agreement matters because this speaks to what promises MusicMaker was making to their customers and if they reneg on that promise, when money is at stake, it makes them a shit company that no one should ever do business with in the future.
I also really don't understand why you're "simping" so hard for MusicMaker. Is it that you've taken a position and you're debating it as an academic exercise or out of boredom? Or are they paying you? I mean ... I've never seen anyone go to bat so hard in favour of a company screwing over their paying customers.
I certainly meant "tech savvy" at the last-- if not out right someone who works in IT. The kinds of questions you rhetorically asked re: the activation process are the kinds of questions I'd ask as an IT worker evaluating a product for use in a business. Those kinds of questions are well beyond what the average tech saavy person would even think to ask. They are "unknown unknowns" to people who haven't dealt with intricate software licensing arrangements.
> I also really don't understand why you're "simping" so hard for MusicMaker. Is it that you've taken a position and you're debating it as an academic exercise or out of boredom? Or are they paying you? I mean ... I've never seen anyone go to bat so hard in favour of a company screwing over their paying customers.
Thanks for articulating this. I was thinking the same thing-- particularly as I watched your interaction the grandparent poster in other parts of these comments. I wanted to say something like this but couldn't come up with an articulate way to do it quickly.
It’s much better you didn’t before, except now you did which sadly undermines the rest of your argument. I wasn’t particularly defending MakeMusic, I was just resisting a pitchfork mob thread that was posting misinformation by people who have absolutely zero actual intent to run Finale next year, and no they’re not paying me :eyeroll:. @gspencley just didn’t understand my position before deciding to troll with multiple mean-spirited low-class and ad-hominem attacks that are wildly against HN guidelines. Unfortunately for him, that demonstrates his argument is weak and that he knows it, since he didn’t feel like he could make his point without stooping to name-calling. Now you know it too.
There is no need to maintain the auth server just make the one-time cost of removing the requirement of the auth server.
As for this particular EULA, if the publisher stops selling the software, they shouldn't be able to revoke existing licenses based on it. The license was granted in exchange for a fee, creating an expectation that the software could be used indefinitely under the agreed terms. Their EULA specifies that revocation is linked to breaches by the licensee, not the publisher's business decisions.
Their EULA lacks any clause that allows revocation simply because the software is no longer sold. Revoking a license under these circumstances would remove their right to use a product they legally purchased, which is a violation of their consumer rights. The publisher's decision to withdraw the software from the market shouldn’t negate the licensee's ability to continue using it as originally intended.
Software being remotely authorized is an implementation detail not a contractual one. It literally doesn't matter. It's their job to allow software legally purchased to continue to function however they are able to do it.
I’m speculating, but it could be possible that turning off authorization is Steingberg’s request or stipulation for offering a Dorico discount. Was that not clear before this point? If true, does it change your calculus at all?
> Software being remotely authorized is an implementation detail not a contractual one.
Section 9 “Authorization” of the June 2021 EULA disproves that claim.
https://wpmedia.makemusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fin...
> It’s their job to allow software legally purchased to continue to function however they are able to do it.
Says who? Do you have any laws or contracts you can cite to back that up? I know you’re just trying to convince me that they shouldn’t be able to turn off remote authorization of new installs next year, however turning off authorization is a thing that can happen with any software packages that use remote authorization, because remote authorization is a common practice. Again, I’m not debating the ethics of said practice. But if you think that remote auth should be illegal, then you should never have bought Finale in the first place.
Yes, that binds the user to authorize their copy. The company must therefore provide the means for them to authorize.
As for the legality, this is pretty contentious issue in many countries which is why we are having this discussion rather than it simply being an open and shut case. A fair amount of this Wikipedia article is dedicated to this subject:
> The company must therefore provide the means for them to authorize.
That’s a logical assumption, if the company wants to do business, but isn’t stated in the EULA or the law. Pay special attention to Finale EULA sections 5, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15.
All this gets extra problematic when a product or a company dies or is transferred. There are very few laws that try to force a product to continue existing once its creator decides to shelve it for any reason, even if it would be trivial for the creator to do so.
Personally, I agree with the guiding principles of the First Sale Doctrine. What we’re concluding here is that your beef is with the idea of software authorization for purchase-once (non-subscription) software that is locally installed and doesn’t depend on cloud services. As a principle, that’s fine, I don’t disagree with it. Given the specifics in this case, it’s not known yet how many people the auth server shutdown will affect next year, but it is possible (I speculate!) that the discounted upgrade path to Dorico might not exist in it’s current form if Finale left the auth server on.
Their agreement with Steinberg doesn't absolve them of their rights to me.
I assume you mean responsibilities? What are those, exactly?
The nuance here is that it depends on the contract between MakeMusic and their customers. If I'm purchasing a subscription and the fine print makes it clear that service may be discontinued at any point for any reason, fair enough. If I make a one-time purchase and expect that I will be able to use what I paid for indefinitely, then them taking down their activation servers without providing a workaround might be a violation of their contract with their customers.
But I'm not making a completely ill-informed proposition when I suggest that the expense would be minimal and fixed for MakeMusic to do what I suggested. Obviously I don't know all of the details about how their software works, so I can't know for sure. I'm making certain assumptions based on how long their software has been around, the fact that they have a remote activation mechanism and having developed software professionally myself for over 25 years.
I want the existing licenses to keep working.
He is the conductor of a local musical group and rewrites the scores for different instruments depending on the orchestra he can find/pay.
This guy has spent thousands of dollars over the years, and now he is faced with.... what? Relearning the interface? Can he still open his old scores, and (rather importantly), will the score "work" in its entirety, with all the accidentals in the right place, the lyrics in the right position and split to the correct notes to be sung, the trumpets in the right key, the timpani using the correct symbols, the repeats and coda correctly defined, the personal additions still working? What about linking each instrument to the correct MIDI output or instrument package?
This goes way beyond just cost, even if for a musician who doesn't make tons of money. The intellectual investment over decades is hard to express to someone who doesn't write music for a living.
The issue here is more about remote authorization in the first place. It’s funny to have this conversation after the fact. It probably should have come before Finale shut down. People against the idea of disabling new authorizations should, instead of complaining about Finale, proactively work to make remote software authorization illegal in the first place. Remote authorization always comes with the risk that authorization will be disabled. I’m guessing it was supposed to be a copy protection scheme, which is widespread and common, not a way to shutdown use. But here we are.
They chose not to release an update with phone home commented out. It was, therefore, a business decision, not a technical one. I understand the reactions to this decision, but I have serious doubts about the claims of harm or number of users who will want to run Finale in 12 months.
How much of the software you have from the 90s do you actually use? Be honest. I hardly ever use any of the software I have. I was a packrat and collected things I thought I was going to use, but 30 years later, I don’t use it.
Exactly what I’d expect from MakeMusic though, they have always been shysters.
The egregoric lifecycle of a company. People that want to make money take over a successful business and run it into the ground not realizing their budget cuts are what killed the company (because, like locus, they've already moved on to the next feast).
Finale does export MusicXML already. And PDF.
https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/258438881308...
> They should do more to allow the software to continue to be activated, as well.
Why? BTW, it can continue to be activated for a year, and existing activations will continue to work after that, as long as the OS remains compatible. What else do you think they should do after development has stopped?
https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/258438881308...
Circling back to your top comment, my point is that the tools to do this already exist. No new tools or freeware is needed, the exporters are already there.
The product is dead, and like any product or business that dies, yes users may have a problem with their archive. It does suck, and I feel for anyone in this situation. I guess the lesson is that this is always the risk with all software, it might lose support. It happens, often.
I don’t see any reasonable alternatives. It doesn’t seem reasonable to demand that someone ending support for a product must turn around and write a new product to continue supporting the dead product. If they’re out of money, they’re out of money, and they can’t afford to retain developers to work on it.
If you are ending a product that users were using to make creative works, then preventing that product from working into the future is robbing the future of the ability to look back at these files.
Imagine a case where 5 years from now you find your backups with files from Finale. You won't be able to read them unless you have an active activated installation. Even if you had the installer backed up so you could re-install, it won't work.
The right thing to do, would be to enable the users to keep running this software, if they have the means + the rights, not activly prevent it from working. Especially if the only thing between a user and using their licensed software, is a license check.
Honestly, it's probably moot anyway: the pirate scene will almost certanly have the activation check patched out in no time.
I had a copy of one of the lesser Cubases from an audio thing I owned. I had it registered and on my account...and then I didn't. And, of course, the contact form only offers options that begin with selecting the software you own in your account, so I was left with useless pre-sale contact options. I had a notion to upgrade to one of the higher Cubase versions and maybe get WaveLab using the lesser version that also came with the hardware, but that permanently soured me on the company.
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Updates
8/27/2024 @ 5:30 PM ET:
Clarifications on the initial announcement
Finale authorization will remain available indefinitely: Please note that future OS changes can still impact your ability to use Finale on new devices.
Finale v27 to be included with Dorico Pro Crossgrades: We are currently working on a solution for all customers who have purchased or intend to purchase a Dorico Pro crossgrade to be able to download Finale v27. This will ensure that you can export your Finale files using MusicXML 4.0, the most robust version of MusicXML available. Thank you for your patience, we will provide more information soon.
Updates
8/27/2024 @ 9:00 AM ET:
Clarifications on the initial announcement
Finale development has ended, but the Finale installer for any previously purchased version can still be downloaded from your eStore account. If your computer crashes or you need to install Finale on a new device, you’re not left without options.
We are committed to keeping the authorization process functional for a year. We’ve heard your concerns and are actively exploring ways to extend flexibility in the weeks ahead.
We understand that learning Dorico will be a steep learning curve, as it is with any complex notation or professional software. Both our team and Steinberg have developed extensive onboarding videos to guide you through the transition.
Edit: Apparently, he already said that it's lighting a fire under him to get it done: https://nitter.poast.org/Tantacrul/status/182807170687273381...
Over 20 years ago I needed to do some engraving for a school band project, and went online looking for a solution. At the time there was SCORE, which produced beautiful pages but was a massive dog to get running on XP (dos emulators were rare and difficult to use), finale, Sibelieus, and LilyPond.
Finale was nice but far too expensive, and Sibelieus was nicer for slightly cheaper. Both rather hard amounts of money to come up with in middle and high school. So that left LilyPond.
My father is a scientist, and therefore quite handy with TeX, so he pushed me rather hard in the direction of LilyPond, running in cygwin. Took me about a week to pick it up, and another week to get my engraving looking the way I wanted. Turned it in after that and got a B from the band teacher, because apparently the school had finale on the library computers, and my output was subtly different (not wrong, different stylistic approaches to auxillary notation such as crescendos) than that of finale.
I still use lilypond to this day. I've played a bit with Sibelieus in the interim, and then dorico when Sibelieus went to hell and dorico was created. Still prefer lilypond.
But all through that period, finale basically felt like the Microsoft office of music engraving. The big juggernaut that no one can topple. Sure, the output of a finale engraving looked like it was a finale engraving, and others might have more aesthetically pleasing output, but finale was the standard. Seeing an upstart like dorico kill them is akin to something like Pages or Zoho office killing word.
I remember back in the 90's when studying for my Music A-Level you essentially had two choices for notation - Finale if you were on a PC, and Sibelius if you had an Acorn.
For that reason, the music department at my school had Acorn Archimedes and then Acorn RiscPC machines.
Sibelius was the all around better piece of software - but I "only" had a windows PC at home, so it was Finale or nothing.
I used Sibelius extensively circa version 5, and refused to upgrade for many years. I used it to get through my music minor in college. I still have the installer and a k*ygen on a hard drive somewhere since they stopped selling licenses to it and I lost mine. Still my preferred software, and yes I've tried Musescore. It's not nearly the same. Old software still works.
Agreed about the user-friendliness. Dorico is one of the most well thought-out, beautiful pieces of software I've seen. Really like the idea of modes - it's a bit complex at first, but think more software should do this. It's a really good way to separate features into different areas, to prevent the shotgun approach that most pieces of large software use, of just splattering features everywhere.
Still, end of an era.
I never though anything would actually threaten Sibelius or Finale, so reading about a new (and good) product has flbeen great.
Maybe it introduces new ways composers can make strange errors when writing music :)
It seems like the letter fully confirms & validates your feeling. ;) There’s just no GUI software started 35 years ago that’s still alive and feels modern and unbloated. Okay, there might be something, but I want to see the examples that prove me wrong. Things that come to mind are like Photoshop or Word, both bloated with legacy and might be dying to web apps. Or Windows itself, also loaded down with legacy. UX standards and expectations have (thankfully) gone way up over time, and it’s practically impossible to keep up without starting over with fresh applications, especially for boutique shops.
In any case, Photoshop, Word, and Windows are not in Finale's position clearly, as they're still far and away leading their respective markets. So, whatever bloat they may have, it's not yet been fatal.
Other old software that's been kept current includes Maya, Blender, Firefox (Netscape), MacOS (NeXTSTEP). I'm sure there are many other examples.
OTOH, I’ve been developing software long enough that you see the same pattern over and over. All application software is fresh and fast at first, and then gets bloated over time, where bloated means it accrues technical debt and accrues hard-to-manage code and accrues features that conflict with each other and slow down development.
Maya’s definitely bloated, and it has been for decades. Users were complaining about it being slow and buggy and a mess of a UI when I was using Maya in production more than 20 years ago. I went to the Maya developer’s conference around maybe 2002 and the devs were complaining about it being hard to maintain.
MacOS got a total ground-up rewrite in between versions 9 and 10, and it helps they built the UI on top of an existing nix. I hope Firefox and Blender last as long as Finale, only time will tell.
But it’s a good point that some bloated software hasn’t died, I have to assume that is because they’re making enough money from it to continue its development. I guess that would be true for Finale too, but that the income isn’t sufficient to carry it forward.
The reason the parent mentioned NeXTSTEP is while MacOS between 9 and X is a ground-up rewrite if you compare those two, Mac OS X was an evolution of the NeXTSTEP codebase from 1989 (34 years ago).
> I went to the Maya developer’s conference around maybe 2002 and the devs were complaining about it being hard to maintain.
I'm not surprised. I'm a bit fuzzy on the pre-history of Maya, but I believe it incorporated software acquired from Alias, Wavefront, and TDI. However, I think part of the performance and bugginess might be from launching on expensive IRIX-based systems and transitioning to commodity hardware an Linux in the early 2000s.
I'm sure there's a lot of old niche software that feels modern and unbloated. Nuke[1] is 31 years old and Houdini[2] is 27. Maya[3] is 26 years old. I would say Maya feels bloated--but at larger places I've worked, people have avoided the newer viewports with more features because the "legacy" viewports are so fast.
It may be hard to make it feel "modern," but I love how optimized "old" code can be if they've been able to resist rewriting it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke_(software)
Full disclosure, I'm the Senior Product Designer for Sibelius, so I'm uniquely embedded in this stuff this week.
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RIP Finale
This is a very sad week for our industry, a titan has fallen. The only other parallel I can think of is when the Sibelius London office closed in 2012. But this feels so much more tangible given the short timescale of the shutoff. Finale will no longer activate within one year, effectively locking people out of their scores.
To all the thousands of users out there who's entire catalogs of scores have now been put in jeopardy, I greatly empathize. I felt similarly back in 2012 when Sibelius looked like it was going away. Back then, Finale was the only viable alternative, though I didn't jump ship at the time. Fortunately, today there's a wealth of options and competition in our industry is strong.
Since this is such a monumental event in the music notation space, the mods and I are going to relax our restrictions on notation software how-to posts (Rule 2) so folks can discuss how to deal with their files, via MusicXML or otherwise. Please keep the conversations civil, I know tensions are high. We will monitor things closely and won't tolerate any animosity toward one platform or another, nor gloating or other unprofessional behavior. (Rule 3)
Back when I was literally 5 years old, I did my first arrangement in Finale. It opened up a new world to me, the world of the written note. Music notation has been my passion forever as a result. No matter which platform you use, remember the joy that music can bring and how these tools enable it. They are essential, and to lose one means a great deal.
I understand wanting to get paid but the Finale family was so onerous in copy protection that it deserves its fate.
I used Finale in highschool in the mid to late 90s to write (admittedly terrible) music when I was in high school. Really amazing program at the time and the instrument voices were good for the time.
I'm sure I have an old piece somewhere floating around on a floppy from that time in a box.
Does anyone happen to know how far back the latest version supports their old file formats?
I can enter 200 or 300 bars in Dorico in the time I could do 20 in Lilypond - and that’s at the rate I could manage when I was using lilypond regularly.
I also think the output is nicer, which also matters here.
Finale, Sibelius, Dorico, MuseScore are primarily for composing (though they have each made their own strides on the engraving front too).
I think they've changed things in the five years since then, so I think I'd have to do it all over again.
If you have the money to spend and like fiddling with pro software I’d recommend it, but if MuseScore meets your needs then I’d stick with it. It seems to be in good hands and should continue to improve over time.
The only thing I can think of is playback with VSTs and other fancy tools (e.g. Philharmonik, NotePerformer) - the fanciest ones are tied to Dorico/Sibelius/Finale. MuseScore now has its own such playback system, Muse Sounds, but each person will have their own preference.
Of course... that's a business focused on casually milking an annuity... Not something that's growing. I guess not with it for the people that bought the company a few years ago.
Finally... Wonder what's happening with those Garritan sound libraries I've invested in....
The developers had also given up trying to get rendering to work correctly. They had a "rerender the whole UI from scratch" menu option for when the rendering inevitably messed up horribly.
It also crashed a lot.
It may honestly have been a factor in me deciding that I could do better in programming than in music, because I felt like even I could do better than that.
I have heard musician friends claim it got better in later years, but I don't quite trust it, since I know what musicians put up with in terms of awkward user interfaces.
So, good riddance.
So Sibelius began as a project by the Finn brothers, then in their early 20s in Cambridge, some time around 1990. Originally it was written for the Acorn Archimedes, a British desktop computer running on ARM RISC processors. (They were decent machines, but having a big platform for native software was THE thing that mattered for personal computing in the 90s, and being essentially UK-only, Archimedes as a platform was doomed - as with Clive Sinclair's C5 light EV, the right idea at the wrong time).
Sibelius grew and thrived for 15 years, porting to PC & Mac on the way, enjoying wide adoption in education especially outside the US, growing to maybe 50 or 100 people, and became Finale's main competitor. In the mid 2000's they were acquired by Avid, who saw the potential to tie in its notation platform with their recording packages for Hollywood and other media composers. The founders stepped back, received royal awards from the Queen, and have kept a fairly low profile since.
Things carried on OK for a few years, but then when the financial crisis hits, the suits and bean-counters running Avid got Ideas. And you know that's not going to end well.
So to understand the importance of what happens next, you need to realise that there are maybe as few as a hundred people in the world who understand both music engraving and C++ application development to an advanced level. Either skill on its own, no big deal. Both together? The Venn overlap on that is _tiny_.
And at that point in time, twenty or thirty of them were working for Sibelius, the same again or a few more at Coda MakeMusic working on Finale, and a handful of others at minor competitors and F/OSS contenders such as Rosegarden. This is 2009 ish - before the mobile/tablet revolution really gets going, and interactive Web apps aren't quite at the maturity level to do professional-quality music engraving with smooth, low-latency UI.
So the top-level Avid suits find out that Western senior engineer salaries are $70K or thereabouts, whereas you can hire a senior engineer in Ukraine for $12K, and send out a decree that ALL engineering functions will be offshored to their development partner in Kiev.
I'm not knocking the Ukrainians. Clever, well-educated, innovative and hard-working to a (wo)man. But... rapidly offshoring a codebase with 15 years of history, addressing what is a very highly specialised domain, almost a culture in its own right, which the vast majority of contract engineers would have zero understanding of?
So, yep. Avid has a profitable (I assume) product, a mature team consisting of a third of the people in the world with that skill set, most of whom are doing it for the love and none of whom are overpaid, and what do the bean-counters do?
Yep, you guessed it. Fire the lot. "For the stock price!"
Now the professional composer community isn't huge. But they're sharp as a pin and well-connected, and this news is, obviously, not taken well. Thankfully the team's PM, Daniel Spreadbury, has the presence of mind to phone a friend at Yamaha-Steinberg. And over the next few weeks they're able to hammer out a deal where almost the entire engineering team is re-hired.
The way I heard it told, he convinced them to give him and his team three years and sufficient budget to build a "new Sibelius". In the end, it took them five-and-a-half, but such is the way of software projects.
So anyway, kudos to Daniel Spreadbury and whoever at Yamaha-Steinberg had the foresight to invest in this. And the opposite to the suits at Avid, who seem to have been bought out by a PE firm last year. So I guess triple yachts all round for them.
This all has me thinking quite hard of getting Dorico!
The development and release of Dorico has also been written about in depth on Daniel Spreadbury's blog, "Making Notes". There used to be some on his Twitter as well.
The middle bit is alluded to here, for example: https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/avid-keeps-sibelius/
And there were long, if somewhat speculative threads on Gearspace (fka Gearslutz) and various composer forums at the time. A few bits I got word of mouth from friends who worked at Yamaha at the time.
It's rare that this happens in the open like this. I expect that it was a factor that OpenJDK was a free software development tool, so Sun already had transferrable licenses from their suppliers. For other types of software, building new software with it is not a consideration from the outset, and licensing agreements with third-party component suppliers will reflect that.
All that is beside the point that Finale devs are under zero obligation to release their code, and generally speaking they have a decent list of reasons not to, plus some specific ones I speculate.
It appears that around 2015 the headquarters for make music moved from MN to CO. https://web.archive.org/web/20140703151047/http://www.finale...
This is around the same time that Greg (who wrote the blog post joined Make Music Inc), who also happens to live in Boulder. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorydellera/details/experienc...
Previously Greg was president of Alfred.com (https://www.linkedin.com/company/alfred-music-publishing-co-...)
My guess is there was likely some move behind the scenes to boost revenue, and keep the business running initiated by a founder, or board member, which resulted in hiring Greg, relocating the headquarters from MN to CO, and probably also shifted the future of makemusic.
would be an interesting read :)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorydellera/details/experienc...
To be clear, the company MakeMusic is not going out of business. They still are running their incredibly popular Make Music Cloud web-based app, used heavily in education (formerly called "Smart Music"). This was just an attempt to jettison a dinosaur in their portfolio. They haven't done any active development of Finale in many years.
Seems like a fun project! I wonder if the problem is licensing.
It doesn't really work like any other DAW.
It has a strong focus on composing sheet music, as opposed to recording and producing full tracks.
Vendors - whether original makers or resellers - are free to offer differential pricing to customers, as long as they don't break equality laws.
Only Steinberg/Dorico are making a sale, I don't see any reason to think Finale are forcing their hand on price.
More likely it's Finale says "offer a good price to our users, and in return we'll promote it to our user-base", and Steinberg decide what that price will be.
Confirmation that the license exists has to be handled a bit carefully for GDPR reasons, but that's not insurmountable. Competitor cross-grades are pretty common practice in those (fewer and fewer each year) sectors which still sell perpetual software licenses.
As @Earw0rm mentioned, this isn’t a “resale” in the sense that that word is defined in the law. Buying Dorico at a discount is not a “resale” of Finale, regardless of the agreement; they’re different products sold by different companies. There is also no evidence, no reason to believe that Finale had any say in the sale price of Dorico. But, yes, the companies did agree to nudge customers from Finale towards Dorico.
The nudge is not mandatory, and the transition is opt-in and not automatic, so customers have the choice, and that lessens the probability that this crosses any laws. Dorico seems to have healthy competition from Sibelius, MuseScore and others, and the market has been called “saturated”, so no clear indication the result would be a monopoly. We also don’t know if Finale solicited agreements from other competitors who declined to participate, and if so that also reduces the possibility of this appearing shady in any way.
This kind of thing happens all the time when products and companies merge or die. It’s legal and acceptable for small companies to merge, and becomes illegal when merger gives the target company too much power, where ‘too much’ is determined by the court. In this case, since these are relatively niche (small) products, and it’s not a corporate merger but simply a targeted advertising & discount sale to a captive audience, and since the result probably isn’t a monopoly for Steinberg, it’s unlikely that any court would care about this agreement. Small companies are allowed to make agreements and do all kinds of things that large companies might get in trouble for.
I wonder what the new "industry standard" will be moving forward. I understand that Dorico was created by the people who originally made Sibelius. I wonder if it's worth trying to get him to experiment with it.
I've been working with MusicXML as a consumer (and occasional contributor) in my own apps for a few years now, and my pet theory is that the _problem domain_ is so complex that any format will fall short of the universe of use cases - or become so cumbersome that its application to a codebase will forever remain buggy / incomplete.
I'm not as familiar with MEI but I don't believe it's any better for preserving music engraving data compared to the musical data itself.
This supposedly was/is in part because Finale's original author Phil Farrand [1] was a musician turned self-taught programmer and Finale was only his second software product.
I tried Dorico but it can't even play trills properly.
One of the main advantages I find in Dorico is it seamless use of NotePerformer. I like MuseScore 4.4 that came out a few days ago, but it's lack of NotePerformer support makes it extremely difficult to fiddle with to sound balanced. Even if the UI is easier, the playback is most important to me.
Making playback sound pleasant, even with their excellent new integration with sound libraries like Spitfire's, is not easy without tweaking notation.
I hope that the MuseScore team fixes this soon. They have been improving very fast.