And this is exactly why there is so little being done with Finale. In
the good old days, it was very common for universities to buy lots of
Finale licenses. Indeed, there was usually an annual upgrade timed to
fit the procurement cycles of academic institutions. I don't have any
data, but I think it is pretty safe to assume there was a time when the
academic use of Finale was far more revenue than the retail use of the
product, especially considering so many of the non-academic users went
for years between upgrades.
I think it is also pretty safe to assume that with MuseScore, the amount
of academic revenue for the Finale notation product has dropped
precipitously.
It is a different situation with SmartMusic. This product remains
successful in education. Indeed it is ONLY for education. And most
importantly, it is a product that works great at the high school level
-- and there are far more high school seats than college seats. If you
look at the websites, Finale is off to its own island. SmartMusic is an
entirely separate website and they don't mention Finale at all.
Looking back to the day that the Minneapolis-based company sold out to
the Colorado Springs-based company, the new CEO talked about the
acquired products not as tools for artists, but as training tools
equivalent to sports training. I thought this might have reflected a
lack of understanding of the Finale product line. In retrospect, it is
clear that they fully understood what they were buying. The only
product they were interested in was SmartMusic and they viewed Finale as
a cash cow to milk for a few more years. I am not criticizing these
decisions. These are probably the best business decisions available.
But I cannot imagine anybody paying $600 (or the discounted $350) for a
new Finale license.
That's pretty much the life story right there. Fortunately there are
two outstanding products that are each evolving quickly (Dorico and
MuseScore). Everything else is a dead end, IMHO.
On 11/8/2018 5:39 PM, David H. Bailey wrote:
Musescore is totally free, very capable and if you install it on your
computer you can simply view your students' assignments without a need
for them to save them as musicxml for you to open in Finale.
There isn't a free program that saves in Finale file format besides
NotePad, and as you point out that's only a Windows program. So the
best free option is for all of you to install and use MuseScore for
your assignments.
David H. Bailey
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