Excellent music notation software running flawlesly on very old 68K machines.
Finale was the first Macintosh product to perform all the functions of musical composition and publishing, from input to playback and part extraction — a revolutionary accomplishment heralding the birth of a new product category. But it burst on the scene in 1988 to mixed reviews. Back then, a program that required a manual was considered an apostate that veered from the True Macintosh Path. People objected to Finale’s learning curve and its confounding array of nested dialog boxes.
Coda Music Technology quickly set about clearing up the program’s problems. After five years and several versions, the result is Finale 3 — the new standard against which all other music-notation products must be judged.
Since version 2, Finale has come with great documentation. Version 3 boasts three superb volumes — nearly 1000 pages — printed on recycled paper. The Installation and Tutorials volume, is the best I’ve ever seen for a piece of software this complex. The tutorial exercises make third-party exercise books unnecessary. The two other tomes organize the material by musical terms and by program functions. The index at the end of each book wisely covers all three volumes, and die visual index tells you what to look up even if you don’t know the name of some musical squiggle or doodad.
A 1988 veteran of Finale would scoff in disbelief to hear this, but Finale’s program interface is splendid. Gone are the nested dialog boxes, the hidden clicks, the ridiculous asterisked text buttons. Instead there’s a floating, reshapable tool palette; online help everywhere; and convenient controls for navigating measures, pages, and staff layers.
The program is 32-bit clean, balloon-help rich, background-processing happy, with technical help available by phone, fax, CompuServe, and America Online. Finale has always come with a free PostScript music font; now you get a TrueType version too. (Unlike in any other program, you’re free to substitute Sonata, Crescendo, or any other font you prefer.)
Some of the new features are potent. The number of windows y-ou can have open is limited only by your computer’s RAM. You can view different scores, different portions of the same score, a full score and extracted part, or all of the above simultaneously. Playback controls and MIDI instrument assignments have been elegantly simplified. You also get a library of 35 templates, from lead sheet to full orchestra. It’s like having a music paper emporium on your hard drive.
Most dramatically, however. Finale 3 offers something called Smart Articulations. These are musical markings — accents, staccatos, fermatas, and the like — that jump into place on the note you click, perfectly centered, perfectly distanced, and (if you wish) placed to avoid overlapping the staff lines. Furthermore, these markings move as their associated notes move, and even flip upside down if the stems change direction. (Yet, unlike in rival programs, you’re still free to move markings anywhere you wish.) The improved Mass Mover tool makes it easy to add articulations to groups of notes — and, because this tool can now select partial measure, its usefulness is quadrupled.
The Shape Designer, Finale’s builtin draw program, has been completely overhauled. You use it to make up your own musical symbols, such as harp pedal diagrams and little “watch me!” eyeglass icons. The new Shape Designer is a mini-MacDraw, easy enough for a child to use.
The manual covers over 75 other enhancements, new features, and interface improvements. All of this joy doesn’t come without a price, however. Users of the initial 3.0 release were distressed with its nasty bugs; many users scurried back to Finale 2 until Coda sent the cleaned-up 3.0.1 version to registered users. MusicProse (Coda’s midrange music program) and Finale for Windows can’t open Finale 3 files. Until those programs arc similarly upgraded, converting their documents to Finale 3 format is a one-way street. And worst of all, Finale 3 is slower than its predecessors, making use on a Mac Plus hopeless and on an LC II impractical for anything but small scores.
So, as with any professional product on the Macintosh, think carefully before buying; while Finale makes the mechanics of composition easier, it won’t make you a composer, an arranger, or a copyist. If your needs don’t merit the investment in time, money, and training, consider an intermediate-level program such as MusicProse (which has an upgrade path to Finale) or Passport’s Encore.
On the other hand. Finale still does what it’s always done best — turning your live keyboard performances instantly into standard sheet music; printing gorgeous scores; converting MIDI files from your sequencer program into standard notation — and it’s now infinitely more pleasant to use. It’s still the only program that uses calibrated width tables for spacing the notes of the music; still one of the few to let you freely move or resize any musical element, from a single note to the entire score; and still the one least likely to limit your notational ambitions, no matter how bizarre. If you find you have high-end needs for notation, no product on the market can match Finale stride for stride. Yet.
Fenno, Richard. (December 1993). Finale 3.0.1. Macworld. (pg. 55).
Macintosh 68k. Runs fine in Mini vMac.
Coda Music Technology
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
40 / 
2017-03-31 / 
c7b84084cc8df480c4eb0c565a594140b90b60d8 / 
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Finale30.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
