I don’t have any insights as to what their plans might be, although given the decades of work that I’ve done with the program, I certainly hope they keep it alive.
Mostly I’m responding here to second (LOUDLY) the desire for vastly improved layout capabilities. It’s only thanks to the wonderful JW and TGTools plug-ins, among others (JW Copy Part Layout is a huge time-saver), that I can even stand the whole layout and collision-avoidance process at all. But formatting scores to avoid collisions is still a huge time commitment and especially annoying when dealing with large orchestra scores as I am currently. While I’m not always happy with how Sibelius's (I own it but don’t use it very often) Magnetic Layout places things, I have to applaud them for including such a function in the first place. And it seems that it does far more good than harm. As opposed to, say, Finale’s Vertical Collision Remover, which results in such grossly exaggerated spaces (at least in large scores) that it’s all but unusable for me. All that said, I’m always happy to be pointed to a technique or a tool I might have missed that solves problems like these and others. Doug > On Apr 18, 2018, at 3:22 PM, Craig Parmerlee <[email protected]> wrote: > > The current owners took over the company in 2014. They delivered > version 25, which provided 64-bit support and a few other odds and ends > -- while dropping some rather significant functionality. I did find > Version 25 to be a little more stable, so I have lived with the feature > deprecation. Since that time, there have been a couple of small patches > -- literally a few dozen bug fixes in 3 years and minimal new capability. > > In the same time frame, Avid dismissed the Sibelius development team and > moved to development to Russia. They went several years with minimal > product improvement, so Finale and Sibelius both seemed both to be on > the same dead end track. > > Meanwhile MuseScore continued to evolve rapidly. And Presonus made an > investment in Notion. The big move was Steinberg/Yamaha hiring the > Sibelius team to develop Dorico. During most of the past 4 years, that > was a "skunk works" or a very immature early product release for > enthusiasts. > > But now that we are well into 2018, the notation world has changed > significantly. It appears to me that Finale is still on a dead end, and > the company is making no effort to communicate any significant plans. > The most revealing thing I could find was this from January: > > https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/namm-2018-makemusic-smartmusic-finale/ > > To summarize that article, it sounds like most efforts are in > SmartMusic, with practically nothing happening with Finale. It is > revealing that they are saying they are not planning anything in 2018 > that would be significant enough to charge an upgrade price for. > > Dorico recently delivered version 1.2, which brings it fairly close to > what one could consider a full-function, commercial-grade product. It > is still lacking in a few areas, such as playback, but is a very viable > product in its own right. And it appears they will launch a major > upgrade with Version 2 in the next few months. > > In the past 12 months, Avid has been very active with Sibelius > development, putting out a series of updates, including the most recent > 8.4 last week. These releases track with Dorico in making the layout > much more flexible and the spacing much more automatic. Meanwhile, it > has been roughly a decade since we saw the last real improvement in > automatic layout in Finale. I increasingly see Finale as a huge > time-waster. It has become typical for 20% of my time on a project to > be consumed in final edits that are now mostly automatic within Dorico > and Sibelius. > > If you can pardon my rant, my real question is if anybody sees any > reason to be optimistic that Finale is going to be anything more than a > dead end. > > > --- > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus > > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > > To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: > [email protected] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: [email protected]
