> I've just reviewed most of the posts dealing with Finale '08, and -- > following what appears to be a consensus around here -- have decided to > stick with '07 until notice of further improvements in known bugs. > > I also took a look at some press statements on the MakeMusic site > announcing quarterly results. Two aspects of those statements are > striking: continued losses, and the importance of notation programs > (relative to other products) in the income stream of the company. > Clearly, this is a company that cannot take a publicity hit with its > prestige notation product. > > From my own informal count on this list, at least twenty established, > long-term, professional users have indicated that they are not switching > to '08; most of them indicate that bug fixing is their main concern, > several of indicated a move to a competing product. > > Perhaps it would be useful to document the number of such users more > precisely and use it as a form of leverage to encourage MakeMusic to > concentrate on improving the product's present functionality before > adding other features. I believe that most of us here would really > prefer to be loyal Finale users, but the benefits of Finale appear for > many of us to have been outweighed by the disadvantages. > > Would it be possible now, from the list membership, to get a more > accurate sense of the number of us who are (a) a long-term, professional > users of Finale, (b) have serious concerns about bug fixes, and (c) iare > either skipping an '08 upgrade or switching to a competing product > during this cycle? > > Daniel Wolf >
I'm a long-term, professional Finale user who used to upgrade regularly, but I've been stuck on Finale 2004a for the past few years. The reason is that Finale 2004b introduced an accidental positioning bug (under certain conditions having to do with hidden layers) that was not serious and easy enough to work around, but would have caused me to scour all my previous scores to find the specific cases that needed adjustment. I stubbornly decided not to upgrade until they fixed this bug. I believe it was finally fixed in Finale 2007, but by then so many more new bugs had been introduced that I'll wait for a stable, relatively bug-free version to upgrade again. I would only consider moving to Sibelius if 1) Sibelius comes to equal or exceed Finale in flexibility, or 2) MM enters a death spiral as a company. Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
