Friends,
I went out to take advantage of the rain soaked soil, and do some weeding in the garden, during which activity I gave some thought to the long term future of Finale. Before continuing, I should say I have no direct connection with Finale, and that everything that is contained in this message is mine own analysis, based upon publicly available information.
So let's review history a bit. Several years ago, Coda was bought by, or reorganized into Net4Music. Net4Music was an ambitious project which appeared to have been intended as an on-line bazaar at which one could purchase music, and where there was a place for composers to self-publish. If my memory does not fail me yet again, this was about the time the Finale Music Viewer plug in was developed, and where there were efforts made to make it easier to publish music to the internet. About a year and a half ago (or was it two and a half? tempus fugit &c), the on-line store was sold to the competitor Sheet Music Direct, a joint venture owned by Hal Leonard and Music Sales, at which time the services available through the website were dramatically curtailed (for example, the self publishing bit, which as far as I know, has not been replicated elsewhere). After the change, in which Net4Music's public persona was changed to MakeMusic!, there were substantial changes to SmartMusic, the history of which I have not yet bothered to find out much about, involving the change from a "buy it once and load it on your computer" model, to an business model, which involves a monthly subscription, and probably a direct internet connection.
I suspect the real bread and butter these days for MakeMusic is the Smart Music business, as this is where there is a substantial recurring revenue stream since there are far more families with musicians in the household to pay 100 USD per year for the Smartmusic subscription, than there are professional engravers who are going to demand the very latest bells and whistles. But the to the extent that SmartMusic succeeds, the future availability of Finale is guaranteed, as Finale is the only way a publisher can write a Smart Music accompaniments.
The down side to this, if I am correct, is that the more a bug affects creation of a smartmusic accompaniment (which I suspect is related to human playback) the higher priority it will receive, and issues like EPS generation for Windows, which affects playback not in the least, will have a lower priority.
There is also the issue involved of how different things are arranged. There is a kernal of core functionality which MakeMusic controls, but there are other things, of which EPS functionality may be one, where they license technology from someone else, developing it inhouse only where absolutlely necessary.
I've never been able to make EPS ffunctionality work (WIN 98 2nd Ed), but I've never needed it. Still, I have not found anything I cannot figure out how to accomplish with any of the versions of Finale I own related to layout of items on a page. My interest in fonts, and in creating digital versions of the typefaces used in letter press production of music has led me to explore typesetting, and I have realized that there are a number of tips and tricks I can borrow from the hand-set type people to make Finale do what I want..
I have no fears that Finale will go away; or that it will become unusable. If worse comes to worse, even if no master key, or key transfer capability is ever released for 2k4, I'll be able to use versions 2k, 2k1, 2k2, or 2k3, to accomplish nearly everything I want to do.
ns 1
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