Customer Reviews

Finale 2003

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

 

 

I have been a Finale user for over ten years and it is quite simply the best music notation software on the market. I have used other products, some extensively, and they do not hold a candle to Finale in terms of capabilities, power and ease of use.

For many years, Finale had a reputation of being the most powerful notation product but not very user-friendly. To a certain extent, this was probably true. I am a composer/arranger and I would spend hours formatting parts extracted from a score, not to mention that it would take hours for the software to extract the parts. With Finale 2003, once I have completed a score, it usually takes less than a minute for the part extraction to run and I have to do very little editing on individual parts before they are ready to print.

MakeMusic (previously Coda Music) has also done a marvelous job with the last two or three Finale releases in making it conform with Microsoft Windows interface standards. Again, when I first started using Finale, it seemed to be a Mac product that had been ported to Windows and there were several non-standard interface elements. That has all changed. If you are a musician and a Windows user, you can be immediately productive with Finale.

Finale 2003's MIDI capabilities are also quite good. My daughter sings and I have produced many accompaniments for her using my MIDI setup. For a number of years, I would use a sequencer for those arrangements. However, for the past three to four years, I have been using Finale, especially when it is a more orchestral-oriented arrangement. In fact, I haven't upgraded my sequencer program in several years since I use Finale almost exclusively now.

Input is also quite easy with Finale. I have completed a marching band arrangement of an orchestral piece while traveling on the highway. I have reached the point where it is sometimes easier and quicker to enter music from the computer keyboard than it is from a MIDI keyboard.

I could go on and on but let me just conclude by saying that by any measure you want to use, Finale is the finest music motation product on the market. It is the gold standard for the professional engraver and hobbyist alike.

My friend and I were both going to play for church. He and I regularly play trumpet/trombone duets. I have a book of empty staves that you can write in music, and for like the past year we had been using that. So this Sabbath (today) we planned on playing "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name". He had given me a book of contemporary hymns that had that hymn in it and told me to arrange it so that there would be harmony (as the book only had melodies that were to be played to a cd). So I stayed up the night arranging, and it gets tedious.
So the next day I go to his house. He shows me that he had installed Finale 2003 on his computer. Figuring that my handwriting would be too hard to read at a glance (I was tired), we decided to transcribe it from paper to Finale 2003.
And it was so easy to use! WE didn't even have to look at the manual! I think we finished the whole trumpet/trombone score in about 10-20 minutes (it was actually longer but we practiced in between).
A few flaws: at first we had to dig deep to find where the rests were, as they weren't on the main screen. But after we found them (under "Tools" then "Rests", pretty straightforward), it was easy to add them. We were kind of in a hurry, so we didn't know where the fermata was, so our piece was fermata-less. Also, when we found out we had too many measures, we had a tough time deleting them and ended printing the extra measures.
But all in all, it's a very good program

As for that $600 price..............my friend's dad will be getting me a copy :).

To the reviewer from Moscow, ID. - who wants to buy a software application and then have to come back to Amazon and buy extra books written by third party users in order to understand how to use the software? Well the answer is nobody - except Amazon.

And to say that Finale is the gold standard for profesionals is absurd. I am a professional copyist and I much prefer to use Sibelius. I only use Finale when required (I am an expert on both). And when I get Finale files from clients - the first thing I do is import them into Sibelius. Most of the publishers I deal with feel the same way.

Finale is good, and you can pretty much do the same things as with Sibelius, but the latter is incredibly faster and easier to use. Sibelius is really intuitive -- I just guess something and it usually works -- which really saves you a lot of time: in a day or two, I knew how to do everything I needed to do. With Finale, I used it for 5 years, and I still don't know how to do certain things. It took me a couple of weeks just to get me started, and still after a year or two I was discovering some pretty essential features.

But the worst part are the bugs. Finale has always been infested by them. I updated the program for 5 years, spending quite a bit of money, and I still would find the most frustrating bugs. With Finale 2002 I wrote a guitar piece -- just one staff! -- that whenever I would click on measure 196, the computer would crash. I could not change that measure at all, so I had to keep that measure the way it was even though I needed to change it.

And this was one of the latest versions of the software. Don't get me started on the earlier ones...

In all fairness, however, I should say that there are a couple of things that are better in Finale. Feathered beams, and changing noteheads to whatever you want are much harder to do with Sibelius. But all in all, Sibelius is much better, faster and more reliable.

There may be some short falls but Finale is tops when you factor what else is availible. Support is good. Even with all it's
power, you can still do short quick charts easily. One thing,
if you are planning on doing full concert band or ochestral scores, get the biggest monitor as you can!

Well, I used Finale for several years and thought it must the best notation software out there, though I found it quite hard work to learn (a story I've often heard from other composers), being a musician first and foremost rather than a computer expert.

Then I tried Sibelius, which took off like wildfire here in the UK a few years ago. A revelation - the difference is so great, nothing would make me go back to Finale now, after all those months of struggling with it before I could get any real work done. I mastered Sibelius in a few hours, and was writing a new piece on it the next day.

The main thing I had to do was unlearn all the complications (endless dialogs etc.) that I'd had to amass for years with Finale - and had always assumed was inevitable when you bought notation software. Now I realise that it's just down to how Finale was designed (for some reason). With Sibelius, you just do the most obvious thing (click on something with the mouse, move it) and just what you expected happens.

So before jumping into buying Finale I recommend you give Sibelius a serious look.

Finale introduced computerized music notation combined with MIDI capabilities to us back in the mid-80's and they have continued to raise the bar every year. For serious composers, there really is no other option. Do not take the reviewers that claim Sibelius is better too seriously. Sibelius created a very pretty interface with the ability to perform simple tasks, but it is very limited. Their interface style has limited them from being able to perform nessasary functions (like the ability to undo) and they have painted themselves into a corner in the sense that there is not a lot room to add new features. Most Sibelius users I know gave up Finale after 2 weeks of using it because it didn't have little cartoon characters that popped out and explained everything to them. Creating software is a compromise of power vs. ease of use. Finale has really hit the perfect mark with this version. It continually becomes easier to use with every version but is not willing to compromise its power.

Sibelius, the composer, might have actually used Sibelius, but his copyist would have used Finale!

I do lots of engraving for music publishers, and Finale 2003 has everything I need for flexibility and class.