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Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

And after that period, in one year and one day, any new installation of Finale will be impossible to activate without a keygen (and I am not aware of any having been released, so far, that work with the "final" version). This will make it impossible to recover the contents of .mus and .musx files by users who do not already have a previous working installation of Finale.

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Yes, that’s correct. The time is now to convert your Finale files, not a year from now. You could easily get stuck before a year is up due to OS upgrades. And you will get stuck eventually for the exact same reason, OS incompatibilities are coming, guaranteed. Finale is officially dead. Right now while it’s still working is when people should archive the contents of their files.

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.

It is unreasonable for the software vendor to impose the task of converting a large mass of files (one by one!) on the users, especially within such a limited time frame. Most users have hundreds, thousands, or more such files to go through. As things stand, a very large amount of music is certain to become lost. A freeware convertor would obviate this particular concern. Very easy to implement, too; just don't disable the export and print functionality anymore in the main application after the "evaluation period" expires.

Are you sure Finale has no batch export? There are free & paid tools available on both Mac & Windows to help automate menu actions and batch convert things.

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.

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