As an alternitive for those Finale users, I highly recommend musescore, it is free and everybit as powerful as Finale. I produce all my music using musescore. It's worth checking out.

oh..... Kiss of Death Syndrome strikes again....

what would you say was the most commonly used format on CPDL after Finale?

My condolences to Mr Giffen. I know he was a devoted and (probably a) highly technical user. I imagine I will be jumping ship from Sibelius to Dorico pretty soon myself. I cannot stomach the greedy subscription model.

Oh—and save all your old files as both PDFs and XML files. XML will allow you to take most of your musical data out of finale and port it over to other programs. It’s not perfect, but it gets you a good head start.

I have an old computer, which all sorts of software that I own, remember those days. So when I need to use Photoshop, Illustrator Chemdraw etc. I fire it up! The old software works fine on an old operating system or even an emulator. Will that work for Finale?

To send out a notice saying “ as of right now you can no longer download to a new computer - and your technical support ended yesterday - but how about buying our other product instead” may not be likely to draw many enthusiastic new signups.

How about “in perpetuity, as a Finale owner on record, you are eligible for a free copy of Dorico upon request.”

MakeMusic would pay for it.

Finale is not rental software, you bought it, along with the right to ask them for a download if you need it.

This is just how software works, unfortunately.

Not so, there is an abundance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software .
For music notation MuseScore, LilyPond, ..., a complete office suite - LibreOffice for general word processing, databases, spreadsheets, etc. ..., for desktop publishing Scribus, ..., operating systems Linux in innumerable varieties ...
N.B. free as in freedom, I can move it to another machine, give copies to my friends (or charge my enemies if they can be fooled into paying).

I JUST threw out my 2005 CD for the program. Gah!

The culprit that caused those pesky single staves on empty pages was always an issue with having an extra "Flow" of music that I forgot to "uncheck" or delete.

Sometimes it's just a setting somewhere that you overlook! Happens to me quite often!

All liturgicial music in the hymnals and missalletes from the publisher I work at are set using Finale. So, we have to transition to something different.

The only reason right now not to use Musescore Studio (which I use for myself) is that I can't create the special time signatures used in the Liedboek (and other Dutch hymnals). Three examples are attached.

Anyone an idea to do that in Musescore Studio 4.4?

Did this not work out for you?

If not, please request it as a feature if you haven't already. It may take a while though.

What will become of all the Finale files on CPDL, IMSLP etc.? That is a great loss.

No decision has yet been made to remove Finale files on CPDL, but I do expect they will be converted to MusicXML (.mxl) files in due course, using Finale's own export to MusicXML routine (which is very good).

Did this not work out for you?

If not, please request it as a feature if you haven't already. It may take a while though.

Yes, it does, but it is still a workaround...

Also, for Dorico users out there...can it do square chant notation or just stemless notes like Finale?

Finale 27 will do chant notation through SMuFL, and since SMuFL was invented by/for Dorico, I would assume the same, but I haven't figured out the SMuFL implementation on Dorico yet, though I am assured it's easier than Finale's. In any case, chant on Finale was always a kludge (even using Medieval). If you do it with SMuFL glyphs, you have to enter neumes as chords to keep the constituent parts together, and it makes better sense to do it in Gregorio and paste in as a graphic.

Ben Byram Wigfield seems to be the early music guy in the Dorico world.He's done some videos that I'll have to explore.

…it makes better sense to do it in Gregorio and paste in as a graphic.

Charles Weaver is offering an introduction to Gregorio for CMAA members, on Oct. 21. (you have to scroll down and click through to find more info for this event, sorry).

Tangent: I am curious about people who don't mentally imagine/compose from the keyboard or other instrument. The really old-fashioned way.

The reason I mention this is that one of the tells of commercial music, and too much including most of what is considered contemporary liturgical music used in Catholic parishes, is primarily instrumental music with a vocal overlay. It's clearly conceived from keyboard and limited by that conception medium. I of course realized compositional masters of prior centuries were not entirely free from this (ja, Herr Handel, we are indeed looking at your choral tenor parts, und, ja, Herr Bach, you could be guilty of expecting human voices to imitate strings and woodwinds), but they almost always had a childhood grounding in choral singing and thus developed the sense for voice leading, cadences, and other necessary habits of composition for the human voice as primary instrument.

A personal example that is far along the tangent: Too many times I find myself noticing that my voice is merely an accompaniment for the "real" action on the keyboard; it's even worse when the keyboardist decides to add more interest for the fingers, destroying more solid harmonic movement and the clarity of cadences. (It's been happening for the last year since the advent of a new DM at my territorial parish that I typically only attend for holydays; just two weeks ago, observing the previously solid longtime tenor cantor consistently go flat as the pianist DM furiously added II/III/VI/VII arpeggiations of divers types, and the congregation gradually deflating as this happens; it's clear no one in charge seems musically qualified to have a word with the DM about the effects of this. How much more interest does a pianist need to add to Immaculate Mary or Sing of Mary or an Alstott responsorial psalm setting, may I ask?).

Liam August 29
Posts: 5,026
Tangent: I am curious about people who don't mentally imagine/compose from the keyboard or other instrument. The really old-fashioned way.

That's how I was taught - compose without an instrument. My teacher said that using an instrument leads to writing what you can play, rather than what you can imagine.

ServiamScores ....The two main logical consequences of this are 1.) no piano. period. verboten.(I physically removed the keyboard from the loft)

Our pastor did the same thing. No piano at all.

You gotta be able to write sitting at a desk. And then you have to play it and you might adjust things.

NOTE: If you see my Great Fugue in C Major I put up last week, that was composed on a long car ride. With organ works, for instance, you have to visualize PLAYING the piece as you are composing, from one note to the next. The Great C uses alternating feet throughout the entire subject. That is called writing idiomatically. Computers don’t warn you when you start writing beyond what is comfortable for human limitations. That has to be in your mind every step of the way.

"The two main logical consequences of this are 1.) no piano. period. verboten.(I physically removed the keyboard from the loft) and 2.) revising the manner in which they are accompanied, which ultimately means, ignoring all these stupid florid arpeggiated piano accompaniments."

Excellent. As I've bleated repeatedly before here and elsewhere, a piece intended for congregational singing presumptively should be written so that it "works" well without accompaniment. It's not because accompaniment is per se problematic, but that composition that fails the presumption is typically (if not always) less worthy of putting in a congregation's mouths to offer to God than it might otherwise have been.

Has anyone used the notation software Forte? Any comments on it?

Although, continuing the rant rather than the original post, I'd like to add that many modern composers are quite ignorant of the human voice in terms of what is natural and comfortable (particularly for a congregation or amateur choir) as well as linguistics, (particularly when it comes to pointing a psalm text). So many awkward melodic leaps.

Another, pet peeve is squeezing too much music on a single line/page or having the lyrics fonts so small than no one can read it without magnification. I was never fond of Finale's lyric font and the default size was much too small when compared to the note size. It took time to increase the font, and then redo all the spacing and page layout.

It would be good to have some proofreaders that will catch such things before self-publishing online.

The matching, legible hymns is important, and to your point, having a distinct style is good too. Well, don’t be like even major Parisian churches using goofy fonts. Be more like Serviam! Or me; I’m an EB Garamond guy, and I turn on the ligatures to make it look a lot like Dom Pothier’s earlier work. I do use the MS Studio defaults, but they don’t clash much (for example, to make our benediction materials: the graphicx package allows me to take a melody-only score made in MS Studio and cropped with macOS Preview or similar software and insert it; I have to use a larger format like letter, but it works well!)

OK, @ServiamScores: I'm, as you can tell, rather annoyed with the MS people.

I am on a Mac trying to give Dorico a whirl. I installed the Steinberg Download Assistant. That's my first problem, this is a Mac. It installed like a Mac app, with the .dmg file, but it had to update a bunch of things before running me through an installer. Very few programs have an installation menu; most allow you to drag to the Applications folder and then you open it. But wait! I was not yet actually running something to download Dorico. I had to go back and forth to files in my download directory, downloaded after clicking in Steinberg Download Assistant, and then messing with Steinberg Application Manager and the website.

There are now six applications on my computer that really don't do anything. Or it's rather unclear what they do. I'm not trying to pick on as MS does some really baffling things on Macs and in general, but installing like a Windows app is not one of them. I’m not sure that, particularly as I can only go with the free version for now, that it’s worth the hassle when installation is so bad.

@ServiamScores

“ I am very careful about this, too. 11pt is the smallest I will use, unless a specific layout absolutely requires me to squeeze it down to 10.5. But such instances are rare. My standard is IowanOldStyle at 11.5, 98% width (this gives taller X height but still retains the default letter spacing as 11pt font).”

I tend to prefer the music to be on the smaller side and I’ll enlarge the text. Sightliness of the score is everything to me. I’ll set the page size and all to 80% and usually enlarge the print to Latin size 14. Then space out the staffing as necessary. Just my preference and so far the choir I work with hasn’t complained any.