Customer Reviews

Finale Allegro 2007

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I had been using Finale Notepad to begin the development of an orchestration piece. I used the trial version of Allegro, and I found it to be EVERYTHING that I wanted. I then looked for the best overall deal I could find, and it was on Amazon. I am extremely pleased with my purchase and with the Allegro 2007 product. I highly recommend it if you want to develop your own musical scores. I would give it a Standing Ovation !!!

Stuart Gustafson

I'm doing the 30 day free trial too, anyway, I'm studying vocals (singing different types of songs) and I wanted to be able to edit the music (change notes around, lengthen them, and then hear them played--and this program does that).

But when I started opening a midi file to take a look at, listen to and edit for my own singing, it doesn't do that too well. Notes are missing and when it plays it squeeks some notes out.

So, I tried it with a Tiff File, same thing.

I then tried starting a new, blank sheet music and copying and filling in the notes, but for some reason the selection, copy keys don't seem to work. Maybe it's me, maybe you'll have better luck with it, maybe I'll try it again, but for now I'm trying out Notation ComposerNotation Composer by Notation Software, so hopefully that works out better.

I recently purchased Finale Allegro 2007 and then updated to 2007b, which is *essential* if you are running Windows Vista. The company claims it is "fully compatible" with Vista, but even with the update, this software runs poorly on Vista (Vista Business version on my laptop). Finale is slow, it is difficult to control note placement even when you zoom in, and 16th and 32nd notes appear bunched together on the screen making them hard to read afterward (I don't know if it prints this way or not, as I haven't been able to finish even one lead sheet yet!) Also, there is no access to either the user manual or the tutorials from within the program--or, at this writing, from outside the program. So, everything I've learned so far about how to use this program has been through tedious trial and error. I am communicating with the company now to find out if there is a workaround for the manual/tutorial problem, but Finale is so much slower than Sibelius on Vista anyway that I'm going to have to abandon it anyway just to get some work done. :(

Finale Allegro 2007 is not compatible with Mac OS 10.6. Some features work but many do not. This fine print is only known if you go to the Finale web site and check the details for system compatibility.

You will also learn this fact when you submit bug reports to Finale for the many things that do not work under Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. Here are a few direct quotes:

- Regarding the Open Recent command not working, "Unfortunately, Allegro 2007 is not supported on the Snow Leopard operating system. We can try one thing and see if it helps. However, I cannot guarantee that we can fix this problem due to an unsupported OS. Please try clearing your Allegro preferences:..."

- Regarding the fact that scanning does not work, "Allegro 2007 was created before Macintosh released the 10.6 operating system, and is not fully compatible with or supported on Macintosh's 10.6 operating system. Please see the following article for information on Finale products that are compatible with Macintosh's 10.6 operating system:..."

I'd like to submit a support request for weird things that happen with lyrics, and for weird things that happen with page layouts, but I can anticipate that the response will be that the software is unsupported.

Finale's recommendation is to buy the software Finale 2010. This costs an extra $300 on top of the $150 I already spent for Allegro 2007. It's not likely that I will spend that much money on the chance that the product will work, and I'm not much inclined to support a bait-and-switch tactic.

Amazon should pull this product from the shelves. It's obsolete.

I bought this product some time ago. The competing Sibelius product was too expensive for my needs and had features that I didn't require so Allegro seemed to make sense. I kept Allegro upgraded and used it to transcribe a lot of music for our baroque orchestra.
However after 2007 the vendor stopped keeping this product up to date. They released new versions of Finale and basically abandoned Allegro. Now Allegro is no longer compatible with Finale, Notepad and their other products. There is a "MusciXML" option which in theory creates huge files that can be opened by Allegro but this simply does not work. Basically you are living in your own world if you purchased Allegro. We can no longer exchange scores with our partners.
Another fundamental flaw of this product is that it does not allow re-setting the starting point at each movement for measure numbers. This makes it unusable for serious orchestral work. The last word on this product is that it is not determined compatible with Windows 7.

I would strongly recommend against this product. Furthermore I would not be inclined to do business with Finale again based upon their abandoning their Allegro customers. For the cost of an upgrade to Finale, you can buy the industry standard Sibelius which is more user friendly.

Finale Allegro is a decent enough product but if you run Mac OS X Leopard and own a scanner not tested by the makers of Finale Allegro, then you might want to rethink your purchase. Allegro 2007 is not officially supported for Leopard and therefore has a great number of bugs. ie. you can't scan music into the program like it promises, or at least that was my experience. Lucky for me I also have a Windows XP machine lying around so I loaded the software on it as well. The software runs much better, but because of my HP all in one scanner I do not get near the scanning results the Finale Website seems to claim I should get. I have been quite disappointed with the scanning portion of the program, often only half of the staves even show up after recognition, and yes I am using uncompressed 300 dpi black and white tiff files. The other huge disappointment I had was with how lame the midi instruments sound. Can anyone say "bad eighties synth"? It's not quite that horrible but garage band's instruments clearly outshine this 200.00 specialty software. So far the only really great reason I can see to buy this version of Finale is that if you upgrade to the full Finale suite you save 100.00. ie. Allegro + upgrade is 500.00 Finale out of the box is 600.00.