NOTATIO

Just to keep up to date, Finale has released the .4 update to version 27.

It offers an unusually lengthy list of fixes and minor improvements; but this has been marred by some installation problems, and on Windows, the loss of access to third-party PDF generators, like Cute PDF.

Scoring Notes has a review.

https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/finale-version-27-4/

The improvement to 'stem collision' is something whose absence used to drive me potty; so it's good that it's been addressed, even though the implementation is a little erratic, according to Jason Lofredo.

Seems to be stable on Windows.

The spacing updates between layers is much improved.

I have just opened a Finale file in 3 years (of trying Sibelius) and I am - lost. I have forgotten it totally.
Still not yet tried Dorico.

They released a patch a couple of days ago too, so 27.4.1 is now the current version. I really only use it anymore to quickly clean up files from a couple of clients and then export XML.

Yes - I only use it for legacy files that I haven't transferred to Dorico. But I'm still interested in how/whether it develops. And I have a soft spot for Garritan/ARIA.

OCTO wrote: ↑14 Dec 2023, 19:05 I have just opened a Finale file in 3 years (of trying Sibelius) and I am - lost. I have forgotten it totally.
Still not yet tried Dorico.

The same thing happened to me recently. After years of using Finale, and only a few months of using Dorico, I had forgotten many of my Finale keyboard shortcuts. It did come back after a while.

I recently tried opening Finale to look at a file, and was completely lost.
I'm now much more comfortable with Dorico than I ever was with Finale.

For you all from Finale, and now using Dorico, how easy was transition? Do you like the output? @MichelRE @John Ruggero

I am working now on a piece done in Finale back in 2018. I have to edit and enlarge it quite a lot. There are numerous instances of extended techniques, hiding notes, nested tuplets, various wave lines, boxes, microtonality, and so on. Quite a task to return back.

However I find the output much more pleasant than in Sibelius I have ever managed to make. It might be the fonts, the spacing algorithm or definition of shapes and curves. Perhaps also because many things are edited manually.

@OCTO, I never have the need for particularly advanced notation (aleatoric, cut-out, microtones, etc...) my music being a bit more on the conservative side, but as far as I know, everything you describe can be achieved in Dorico.

The transition for me was... not bad.
I started out simply recopying (without XML import) from a printed Finale file, a 25-minute violin concerto. It took me around 2 weeks, mostly because I kept having to refer back to my little notebook of Dorico shortcuts (I kept forgetting how to input triplets, for example... but that's a "me" issue, really bad memory.)

Since then I've entered 2 symphonies, actually written from scratch a viola concerto, 2 string quartets, and am getting ready to transfer a set of piano variations from Finale into Dorico... again, without the help of XML. I rather like the feeling of doing this from scratch. It also allows me a bit of creative freedom as I re-enter notes to go "off script" in spots.

Dorico's major use of keyboard shortcuts, avoiding the need for accessing various menus to achieve different effects, is a big change. You can enter notes, articulations, slurs, dynamics, all at once, in one fell swoop, when you know the keyboard shortcuts for each. And they are sticky. So you can enter an entire passage of notes with staccato articulations by simply pressing the staccato shortcut once before entering notes.

Like Finale, there are also filters that allow you to copy specific elements of any passage, like beaming changes, or articulation combinations.

One fun feature, if you have a long passage of dotted notes, like , you can enter all straight eighths then just select the 1st notes and press "." to change to that rhythm.

Oh, and of course, the game changer for me which pushed me to change from Finale to Dorico was: instant parts that are almost perfectly formatted. So no more months of preparing parts as I had to do with Finale.