Just looking for opinions and thoughtful speculation. Finale had to go private to get an infusion of capital. But they seem to be nearing a new product release that has the potential to put them on a more solid footing.
Avid acquired Sibelius, and that company seems to be in a real mess at this point. They released the original development team, supposedly moving development to the Ukraine. But in the meantime their ProTools franchise is falling apart. ProTools had enjoyed the position of dominant DAW in professional, high-end recording studios. But those studios are dying off very quickly as other DAWs make recording technology so much more accessible. There have also been some ugly lawsuits. Avid seems to be saying even less than Finale about the future of Sibelius. The interesting player is Steinberg, which made its reputation on the basis of the Cubase DAW and the invention of Virtual Studio Technology (VST) which is now the dominant standard for studio plug-ins. it seems that most of the London-based Sibelius developers ended up working for Steinberg, and they are talking fairly openly about their project to build a new notation product from the ground up. See http://blog.steinberg.net/2013/09/development-diary-part-three/#more-343 That's a major effort, and I have no idea when it might result in a product. But one thing is certain: that product will have a high degree of integration with the DAW world because Steinberg is all about music production.playback. And then there is the MuseScore open source project. I have not followed this closely, but it seems to have lost some momentum. The last release was February of this year. It seems to me they did more frequent releases in 2012. Their forum does indicate a certain following. So the questions that come to mind are these: 1) Has MuseScore killed the goose that laid the golden eggs for Finale and Sibelius -- that is the academic settings? 2) I assume most people on this forum believe MakeMusic and Finale will still be alive in 2016. But will they product be vibrant or mostly in maintenance mode? 3) Is Sibelius dead? Will Avid be dead by 2016? 4) Do we expect Steinberg Notation will be a real player by 2016? _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
