There's also a dedicated Exercise Wizard (which instrumental teachers will love) to very quickly generate hundreds of different types of scales, interval patterns, arpeggios, more complex 'twisters', rhythms and jazz licks. If you're notating music for absolute beginners you can even take advantage of the included Alphanotes font, which imposes letter names on noteheads.Ī Setup Wizard helps you get going quickly with new scores, defining instruments from an impressively comprehensive list, setting initial key and time signature, and adding titles and composer/arranger information. Also in this latest version of Finale comes dedicated mallet and percussion fonts which will be welcomed by all those who hit stuff for a living. You can opt for a respectful, engraved look or a groovy, jazz-oriented pen-and-ink style, courtesy of the bundled Maestro and Copyist music fonts. Pop and jazz are catered for with chord symbols, guitar fretboard symbols, tab, drum kit and percussion notation. As you'd expect, there's practically no limit to the complexity of score that can be produced - everything from a single-stave solo part to a symphony orchestra and choir, and even 'special' notation for the avant garde. Music educators need something slightly different again, including page layout capabilities for producing worksheets.įinale 2012 caters for all of these, and others, with an extensive and to some extent configurable feature set. A composer, meanwhile, might look for a platform that assists experimentation, with good playback sounds. A professional copyist, preparing scores for commercial print, needs top-class engraving quality and notation flexibility. Notation means different things to different people. I always fancied learning the Knotweed Flute. The instrument list that appears as part of the score Setup Wizard is almost obsessively comprehensive. Or, indeed, that both MakeMusic and Avid, the parent companies of Finale and Sibelius, offer crossgrade deals to try and poach their rival's users. Since then, the two applications have been vying for supremacy (to put a dramatic spin on it) and it's no coincidence that their asking prices are pretty much identical. It happens to be the reason why I first bought a Mac, so I feel some special affinity with the old girl.įinale received a broadside in the '90s, though, with the arrival of the competitor notation package Sibelius, at first only on the niche RISC-based Acorn Archimedes platform, but later on Mac OS and Windows too. Back then, and through the first half of the '90s, if you needed really flexible notation delivered through a graphical user interface it really was the only game in town. Engraving quality is superb, but in this score, created with the Setup Wizard, longer stave names were disappearing into the margins, or off the page completely.īy any standards, Finale is a long-lived application, with roots stretching back into the 1980s. It's busy, and there are plenty of techniques to learn, but it's certainly configurable. What does its 2012 incarnation bring?įinale 2012's working environment sees palettes and floating windows accompanying a score window. MakeMusic's Finale score-writing software has been helping composers and publishers for a quarter of a century.
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