Fireproof Socks

Summary

Here is a short history of my feverish rants while getting knocked around by Finale while trying to complete a serious project under a deadline. In short, Finale did not cover my back. It really let me down and the project suffered. I recommend Sibelius for large orchestral projects. These points apply to the Mac OS X versions of both programs, but I’m sure some of these comparisons hold true for the Windows versions. In a nutshell, don’t get Finale if you’re on a Mac. It’s just not there yet, and the lack of features and functionality is really a deal-breaker for any serious user.

Mass Edit Tool is a Failure

Finale has its mass edit tool, so you can highlight vast swaths of music and paste it into another part… sort of. What isn’t immediately obvious is that if you only select the starting measure of your target, only that one measure will get pasted. So you’ll need to highlight the exact passage again in the target part before your paste will be successful. That’s a real pain. What’s worse is that Finale is not at all smart about the pastes… For example, say you have to paste over part of a multi-rest. Finale can’t recalculate the rests, so you make them multi-rests again yourself.

No Paper Manual; PDF Search Feature is Quirky

This is a common lament nowadays, but Finale has its entire manual in a pdf, which is fine, so long as you don’t actually need to use it. (Sibelius still offers a paper manual). When you search for a term in Finale’s PDF, it takes a long time, and worse, if you have already opened up a chapter for a previous search, the search will apply only to this chapter (i.e. the current chapter document). You have to do some work-around work to get back to the complete help documentation and re-enter your search.

Rehearsal Marks

Good grief… adding a rehearsal mark is an exercise in futility. If the top staff is hidden, the mark won’t show.

Extracting Parts

When extracting parts, Finale needs you to hold its hand — if it encounters 2 files that have the same name, it can’t figure out a unique name on its own… and it actually doesn’t let you rename them either. You can choose to cancel the saving of the file, or overwrite the file, but you can’t rename it (!). You might think that you can spare yourself the trouble by choosing to save each file manually. But no! There’s more stupidity! If you choose to name your parts manually in an effort to avoid the pain of watching Finale fruitlessly try to name the files itself, you’re in for a real sick treat: Finale lets you name the parts, but as they pop up, one after another, it gives you no clue as to which part is which. No staff name, no part name, nothing. So have fun with this! It’s almost guaranteed to waste hours of time.

Saving Files

Finale loves to make a copy of each file it’s working on, which is good… I just wish it didn’t do it in the same directory as the one I’m working on… it leaves this little poopie trail everywhere it goes, and after you’re done working on a project, you’ve got to clean up after it. Having a two files with nearly identical names is confusing. I’ve wasted hours of time when I’ve inadvertently copied an old version of a file just because I wasn’t expecting there to suddenly be 2 versions of everything.

To make matters worse, Finale changes an open file when you switch views to another open file – i.e. it marks the file as needing to be saved. If you try to quit Finale with multiple files open, beware the onslaught of "error" messages because for Finale, only the active window can be saved. What if you actually DID change an open file, then went to check something in another file? Good luck finding your way back to the file you changed. It’s like a bad version of the shell and ball game.

Opening Files

When you open up a file, Finale can’t seem to remember which view it was in: Scroll, Page, or Track.

Recent Files

Open Recent Files –> This menu totally doesn’t work. What do you have to do to get Finale to remember which file you opened last? Seriously… you’d have better luck if you gave a 2 year old a crayon and had him write down your recently used files. "Hey, Jimmy, what was that file I had open about 2 weeks ago… started with an M or something?"

Printing

Ha. Try telling Finale to print a single page, e.g. page 13. You know the trick: print pages 13 to 13. But Finale prints pages 1 to 13. Thanks, Finale. Just what I needed.

Page view

I thought I was just going senile, but Finale keeps drifting in its horizontal scroll when you’re in page view. It likes to push the view over about about a third, making it a real pain to see what’s going on at the left side of the page.

No Keyboard Shortcuts

No keyboard shortcuts for the tools? Are you serious? It’s annoying that every single thing has to be filtered through some obscure tool, but then to deny keyboard shortcuts to those tools is almost obscene. I better not run into you in a dark alley if this was your idea. It just [-edited-] me off more to know that this feature is available for the Windows version. Who’s writing your code? News flash: you need to hire a few more developers.

Problems Selecting a HUGE Item

If you’ve got the tools, and you have to select a certain layer before you can select an item, why do you still use the little square to actually select it? It’s a pain in the ass to click the little square when you’re trying to move a rehearsal mark… the thing is frickin’ huge, so why restrict selection to such a small point when you’ve already specified that you’re only touching expressions?

Manage Parts

This will supposedly handle voice 1 going to part 1 when you extract parts. Ha. At least there’s the "Process Extracted Parts" plugin. Seems redundant, but keep in mind Finale doesn’t actually do what you might think it should.

Part Extraction

Well, ok, so you realize that simple part extraction is going to take a long time using Finale. Call your friends to help. But wait… Finale isn’t backward compatible, so if your friends don’t have the same (or newer) version as you, they won’t be able to bail you out. This is the final blow, really.