Finale 2010 Buy Now

I've used Finale since 1995, producing hundreds of arrangements and compositions, engraving music for other composers and arrangers, and even creating a theory textbook. Generally speaking, Finale has been an excellent product, and I've never found anything that couldn't be notated using this program. However, recent updates have become less and less stable as the program has gotten more complex. Even with a new computer, Finale 2008 and 2009 were having trouble playing back large scores and would occasionally crash for no reason. Finale 2010 reorganizes many notational inputs and is much smoother graphically, but after a few months' use, I found a terrible problem: Finale 2010 would crash when I tried to open complex files created on earlier versions of of the program! That means I can't access some of my older work to make changes or even print out a new copy. After the crash, Finale 2010 wouldn't start again until I restarted the computer.

I contacted MakeMusic about this and sent them one of the files that wouldn't open. They agreed that Finale 2010 crashed when trying to open the file and acknowledged that the file still opens well in Finale 2008. Their advice was to identify all files with this problem, export them as XML files and import them into Finale 2010. The problem is that I have so many files (thousands!) that it would take weeks to attempt to open every single file, especially if the program keeps crashing and I have to restart the computer over and over. The other option was to keep older versions of Finale on the computer, but that would take up a lot of hard drive space and file managing could get problematic. So, at the moment, I'm considering downgrading to Finale 2009 and never updating again!

Since the Sibelius notation software has emerged as competition for Finale, my impression is that MakeMusic is releasing more and more "upgrades" that aren't thoroughly tested, and this issue is simply a deal-breaker. In concept, the program is still very good, and if you're just getting started, it's still the standard in notation software, but I cannot recommend this version of Finale to longtime users.Get more detail about Finale 2010.