Finale and notation software… what’s next?

[Latios212]

Hi everyone!

A couple of weeks ago, the company MakeMusic announced that the music notation program Finale is discontinued effective immediately. Any Finale users are being encouraged to migrate to other music notation programs. As you might know, all of the 5000+ sheets we host on our site are engraved using Finale. So what does this mean for NinSheetMusic?

Well, let's first start with what's not changing. All of the files we offer you today aren't going anywhere. Nothing is happening to the PDF and MIDI file formats. So for any users using the site to download sheet music or MIDI files, this has no impact at all. And for those interested in notation files or those who have arrangements on the site, discontinuation of the program doesn't affect the mountain of Finale files we've accumulated over the years. The Finale files will stay and still be usable by those who still have Finale running on their computers. We also will continue to accept submissions made using Finale for the foreseeable future.

What will change, then? As Finale slowly fades into obscurity, we are planning to do what some of our users have been requesting for a long time - start accepting sheet music made using MuseScore. It would be great to allow users to submit sheets made by any notation program of their choice, but that is not practical at the moment. As a first step, we will focus on adding support for sheets made using MuseScore. This is a natural direction to go since MuseScore is free, making it easier for newer arrangers to get started contributing, and open source, putting the fate of the program more in the hands of users. We are lucky to have many community members already intimately familiar with MuseScore to assist. We also plan on adding support for the MusicXML file type on the main site for users to be able to more easily use their program of choice. If this all goes well, we will continue to investigate adding support for more programs like Dorico, which MakeMusic is recommending as Finale's replacement.

All that said, it will take some time to put these changes in effect, so nothing is changing about the submissions process right now. There is a considerable amount of work to be done, including adding support for additional file types on the website and developing guidelines and tools to ensure that sheets created using MuseScore are visually consistent with the rest of our library. So for now, any arrangers submitting to the site should continue with Finale, following the submission process that has been in place for many years. But it may be helpful to start becoming familiar with writing sheets in MuseScore as it's become clear that using Finale is unsustainable long-term. For those MuseScore users who have been discouraged by the submissions process in the past, keep an eye out for when we will start allowing MuseScore submissions! We will keep you posted about developments as they come.

I think that's all for now; thanks for making it this far! Feel free to ask any questions you may have!

[Bowserdude]

Yessss, been waiting for this since 2016!

[jabbetween]

Yessss, been waiting for this since 2016!

Really looking forward to the surprises! It's worth the wait.

[TheZeldaPianist275]

Thanks for the update, Latios! Sounds like a ton of work for the staff. Kudos for taking it on. I have a few questions about this:

-Are there any differences between Finale's and Musescore's respective formatting that appear to be unsurmountable? If I remember correctly from seeing some MuseScore sheets back in the day, the notation never appeared as sharp and crisp as sheets that were written natively in Finale, for example.

-Down the road, when Finale versions are more or less unusable because of lack of developer support, will the option to submit .mus files be removed entirely? Or is that a bridge to cross when we get there?

-What can the shock troops in the community (me) do to be helpful for the transition process here?

[Latios212]

Good questions!

-Are there any differences between Finale's and Musescore's respective formatting that appear to be unsurmountable? If I remember correctly from seeing some MuseScore sheets back in the day, the notation never appeared as sharp and crisp as sheets that were written natively in Finale, for example.

Not anymore! By default, MuseScore sheets do look pretty different from sheets made from the Finale template we've been using. But we (@XiaoMigros in particular) have been doing a bunch of investigation around matching the same fonts/styles in MuseScore to meet visual parity. You can get a sneak peek of that with @Static's sheet here, where the PDFs generated from the Finale and MuseScore versions look remarkably similar. We'll have more guidance around this to come soon (tm).

-Down the road, when Finale versions are more or less unusable because of lack of developer support, will the option to submit .mus files be removed entirely? Or is that a bridge to cross when we get there?

No plan at the moment. We'll think more about that as time goes on and we have fewer members around who have the program readily available to use. Even without any further developer support, we can still manage to get by with the state Finale is in today.

-What can the shock troops in the community (me) do to be helpful for the transition process here?

Thank you (and others who I've been talking to as well) for offering to help I'd say these few things for now:
- If you are able to help check any current submissions at all, that would really help as some of our staff (mostly Xiao and myself) are focusing more of our attention on this transition than reviewing existing submissions. You don't have to be an updater or review everything about a sheet to leave helpful comments!
- If you're not familiar with MuseScore already, you can try and mess around with it to build some familiarity and expertise. We will likely eventually rely partially on community support for help engraving with MuseScore so the more members around who are familiar with it, the better. As for actual sheets to submit, after we finish drafting up guidelines for how to format submissions in MuseScore, we'll need people to run through it and see if the process is smooth so we can refine it. That will need to wait a little bit (a few weeks?) until we finish writing that up though!

[Tobbeh99]

Y saw this. I guess instead of mus-files we could use xml files. Maybe?

[TheZeldaPianist275]

Good questions!
Not anymore! By default, MuseScore sheets do look pretty different from sheets made from the Finale template we've been using. But we (@XiaoMigros in particular) have been doing a bunch of investigation around matching the same fonts/styles in MuseScore to meet visual parity. You can get a sneak peek of that with @Static's sheet here, where the PDFs generated from the Finale and MuseScore versions look remarkably similar. We'll have more guidance around this to come soon (tm).

They do look quite similar, but I think this is an example of what I'm talking about--doesn't the Finale PDF look a little sharper? Like, a 720p to 1080p bump in clarity? I've always wondered what causes that.

Thank you (and others who I've been talking to as well) for offering to help I'd say these few things for now:
- If you are able to help check any current submissions at all, that would really help as some of our staff (mostly Xiao and myself) are focusing more of our attention on this transition than reviewing existing submissions. You don't have to be an updater or review everything about a sheet to leave helpful comments!
- If you're not familiar with MuseScore already, you can try and mess around with it to build some familiarity and expertise. We will likely eventually rely partially on community support for help engraving with MuseScore so the more members around who are familiar with it, the better. As for actual sheets to submit, after we finish drafting up guidelines for how to format submissions in MuseScore, we'll need people to run through it and see if the process is smooth so we can refine it. That will need to wait a little bit (a few weeks?) until we finish writing that up though!

o7 Orders received!

[BlackDragonSlayer]

Y saw this. I guess instead of mus-files we could use xml files. Maybe?

That's mentioned in the post. There are some issues with using exclusively MusicXML files, but we'll likely be adding for support for them in addition to a native file (e.g. the mus equivalent for other notation software).

[XiaoMigros]

doesn't the Finale PDF look a little sharper? Like, a 720p to 1080p bump in clarity? I've always wondered what causes that.

If by sharper you do really mean the resolution, that option is completely customisable in musescore and could be scaled to the ideal value

[yeebo]

finally!!! the silly and arbitrary reign of finale is over! sibelius users stay winning

[XiaoMigros]

noteflight users too

[cashwarrior1]

Don't forget clairnote

[ZeldaMotherMan]

Would there be any interest for the community to assist the transition? I have experience in writing compositions/arrangements in both Finale and MuseScore as well as converting between the two.

[Mr_Chicken]

Saw this and my heart dropped lol. You can't start things like that man ur scarin me.
W for MuseScore though, always wondered why we didn't use it.

[XiaoMigros]

Would there be any interest for the community to assist the transition? I have experience in writing compositions/arrangements in both Finale and MuseScore as well as converting between the two.

Thanks for the offer! Currently we are dealing with the more technical side of the transition rather than with arrangements/conversions themselves, but we'll let you know if and when the community could step in!