Alternates to Finale for music scores

[billooms]

If you use Finale for music notation, then you know that Finale has reached its end as of last Monday. That means that those of us who write/publish music will have to make the transition to Dorico (recommended by MakeMusic) or Sibelius. Either way, the only way to transfer your existing work is by exporting from Finale using MusicXML and then inputting that to Dorico (or Sibelius). For very simple scores, this may work. For intermediate/advanced level harp music that will only get you part way. Attached are the first 2 pages of Tournier’s Fantasy (courtesy of Carl Swanson). After exporting to MusicXML and inputting to Dorico (also attached) you can see that the translation process only gets most of the notes in the right measures and very little beyond that. (Some notes were incorrect in measures 6 & 7). Notice that not even the stem direction was copied properly!

I was able to edit the first page in Dorico and get it looking very close to the same. My initial reaction is that Dorico may very well have all of the capabilities that we need, but the learning curve will be difficult. I’ll provide updates from time to time as I learn more about the program.

My preliminary recomendation is: Take advantage of Finale’s offer to allow you to get the latest version (v27.4.1) and keep using that for existing scores as long as you can. If you’re on a Mac computer, don’t upgrade to the new MacOS 15 (Sequoia) which is due out in September because the current Finale may not work on that OS. This will at least buy you some time if you choose to make the transition to Dorico (or Sibelius) for new work.

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[billooms]

Here’s an update on transferring music from Finale to Dorico. On my prior post, I noted that the stem directions were not preserved in the transfer. This is an option on MusicXML input and by setting that option the stem directions are preserved.
As I’m learning Dorico, I used the first 2 pages of Tournier’s Fantasy (courtesy of Carl Swanson) to see if Dorico could be made to look the same as the published music. The answer is basically yes (see attached). There are still some minor edits I could do (nudging things a bit for identical spacing, fiddling with font sizes and styles, etc) but it generally can be made to look the same.
The one thing Dorico does well compared to Finale is how it handles harp pedal changes. One can enter a pedal diagram (or letters, as desired) at any place in the score. Notes will turn red if there is a need for a pedal change (i.e. an accidental, back to natural, etc). Enharmonic spellings are easy to enter.

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[Michelle Stone]

Hello Fellow Harpists –

Does anyone use Muse Score to arrange harp scores? I am a long-time Finale user contemplating buying into the Dorico cross-over from Finale. I’m just beginning to get pretty adept at Finale, and I hate the idea of learning a new notation system that may or may not be compatible with my needs. I’ve read some recent reviews about Muse Score and would love to hear any feedback from harpists who may have used it.

Thanks for your input!

[Andelin]

Michelle,

I use Musescore quite a bit. I’ve been using the free version for years. I’m an “amateur” writer/arranger, but have used Musescore for writing harp trios, among other things. I’ve never used finale, so I can’t compare the two. But this far, I have found Musescore to meet my notation needs. It took a minute or two to figure out the program, but it’s pretty intuitive, and if there’s something I run into that I can’t remember how to do, I can usually find directions pretty easily on the website.

What features are you most curious about?

Do you have any other questions?

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

There is a basic problem with using software. You cannot extract your music from software without using hopefully another software. You have no real ownership of it anymore. If you can learn to make a neat score by hand, you should do that and scan it or photocopy it. That’s what the composer Steven Paulus did. I lost a lot of work by having to change computers or update software. At best, you can hopefully export to a pdf file so you have a permanent copy. But to make any revisions, you would have to input it all over again. I have yet to see a software that could produce scores as well as a fine publisher does.

[wil-weten]

I use MuseScore 3 a lot. I’m not sure whether the bugs and the less than adequate items in the handbook of MuseScore 4 have finally been dealt with, but MuseScore 3 actually can do everything I want it to do and it’s extremely versatile and you can have great layouts. The MuseScore music notation program is completely free and without ads, and downloadable from musescore.org (which is quite different from musescore.com which tries to sell you subscriptions for the use of their sheet music).

Anyway, in MuseScore 3 I regularly use the beta function of importing a PDF to sheet music, so that I can easily adapt or transpose music. Yes, it does take some editing to make things perfect, and yes, to work this way efficiently, you need a bit more knowledge of MuseScore than it takes to get started working with MuseScore, but it still saves me loads of time comparing with typing everything over by hand.

There’s a great and active community forum where one can find or ask one’s questions and get adequate answers.

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