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No other music notation software offers Finale’s level of control, letting you decide both what and how you create. At every rehearsal, know that your score will sound great, your parts are ready, and you have clearly communicated your musical vision.
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Finale v25. Rewritten to offer full 64-bit support, Finale...
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Updates 8/30/2024 @ 3:00 PM ET: Finale v27 upgrades now...
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Finale is the ultimate music notation program with integrated Garritan sounds and complete control over the printed page. PrintMusic is a fast and simple alternative for musicians, composers, and arrangers. Notepad is a free introduction to music notation software.
Finale is a proprietary music notation software developed and released by MakeMusic for Microsoft Windows and macOS from 1988 until 2024, when it was discontinued. [2] Functionality.
Rest assured, your Finale download does not contain any viruses. If you are installing on Windows, make sure you are logged in as the System Administrator and reboot after installation. To download and install Finale. Download the Finale installer from your www.makemusic.com account.
- Prelude: Installation, Getting Started, Technical Stuff
- The Main Event: SMuFL
- The Rest: MusicXML, Sharing, Instrument Updates
- Postlude: Final Impression and The Road Ahead
Sometimes in a Scoring Notes review we can’t wait to head straight to the shiny new features and we leave the technical details for later. In this case, though, we’ll start with the installation process.
The history
If your only notation software program of choice is Finale, and you’re a first-time visitor to Scoring Notes (welcome, friend!), you might be wondering what SMuFL is. SMuFL — Standard Music Font Layout — is a specification first initiated by Steinberg in 2013for use in Dorico. SMuFL aims to categorize and standardize every glyph used in music notation — now at well over 3,000 in a complete implementation — and assign it a fixed position in a single Unicode font. This means that, regardless of...
What’s in SMuFL
So what’s in SMuFL? As mentioned earlier, pretty much everything. The only music font used in the (incredibly serious) music example above is Finale Maestro — the new default SMuFL font installed with Finale v27. Finale Maestro weighs in at 2,745 glyphs — not quite the 3,500+ that’s in Bravura, but still more than 13 times the classic Maestro font, which only had about 200 glyphs. Items like the quadruple pianissimo (U+E529), doit (U+E5D4), rough fall (U+E5DE), arpeggio up (U+E634), bow behin...
What SMuFL can do
The power of SMuFL is essentially twofold. The first part of the power is the ability to access thousands of glyphs all within a single font. The second part is the ability to easily swap that font with any other font that is SMuFL-compliant. That means you can experiment with a number of engraved looks, which could be Finale Maestro… Or Bravura… Or one of the growing number of SMuFL fonts by independent font designers, like Nor Eddine Bahha’s Tutti font… Or Music Type Foundry’s Scorlatti fon...
MusicXML 4.0
MusicXML is an open standard used by hundreds of music applications, but it is still very much tightly and most effectively integrated into Finale, owing to MakeMusic’s acquisition of Michael Good’s company Recordare in 2011. Michael, the inventor of MusicXML, is a MakeMusic vice president and also one of the three co-chairs of the group that manages MusicXML’s development, so it comes as no surprise that Finale is evermore aligned with MusicXML’s trajectory. It’s also not surprising that Mus...
Sharing
We’ll be the first to admit that we are not the ideal target audience for SmartMusic, MakeMusic’s popular music learning software for educators and students with more than 25,000 titles in its interactive web-based library, with a practice application that provides real-time feedback and accompaniment. So initially we were a bit skeptical when SmartMusic sharing was announced as a feature in Finale v27. But for certain types of users and use cases, it could be a welcome addition. There has lo...
Instrument updates
MakeMusic says that “Finale v27 launches with meticulous reworking of its instrument database that will help you make music your way, even more efficiently. The changes we’ve made are designed to be practically invisible—Finale gets the details about each instrument right the first time without any manual input. You may notice that you can create documents and add instruments to existing ones more easily and more reliably than ever.” It’s hard to get too excited here, but in any event, we’re...
If you’ve made it this far and want even more Scoring Notes coverage about Finale v27, you’re in luck! We’ll be talking about all of this and more on the Scoring Notes podcast episode to be released on June 19. And we’ve already spoken with Jason Wick on the podcastabout Finale’s development. There’s no question that adding SMuFL support to Finale ...
Finale is a program for creating and publishing sheet music and audio performances. These tutorials guide you through the basics of starting, entering, editing, formatting, and playing your scores.
Finale v25. Rewritten to offer full 64-bit support, Finale can make the most of your computer and the latest operating systems. When entering notes into transposing staves, the new Finale plays the correctly transposed pitch both upon entry and playback.
