I’ve been on full tilt with working on my album for NaSoAlMo, and this weekend was the first I was actually blocked. So I spent some time trying out Finale.
Finale is touted as the premier typesetting software for music manuscripts. When I saw an academic version for sale at the closing of Brook Mays a few weeks back, I scooped it up. A full version costs a good $600, and I managed to grab it for $107.
I played around with it today, and I’m glad I didn’t shell out that additional $493. As thorough as Finale can be, the user interface is one of the most difficult I’ve ever encountered.
I must confess some bias here — I’ve been using Cakewalk’s staff view whenever I work, so I’m quite accustomed to editing pieces note-by-note. I can right-click on a "note" (it’s really a MIDI event) and set all the parameters for it — pitch, duration, volume. Cakewalk’s staff view isn’t the smartest when it comes to proper notation — the beaming can get quite absurd — but it’s fast. I can drag notes easily between staffs, and Cakewalk is incredibly flexible when it comes to adding notes non-sequentially. I may not know how a measure starts, but if I know it ends on an upbeat, I can notate that quickly.
Finale is either not as smart as Cakewalk or just very rigid about how input is handled. It’s a bit more of the latter than the former.
In fact, a lot of things are incredibly rigid about Finale. In Cakewalk, the arrow tool is a powerful multi-tasker. In Finale, the arrow tool is terribly limited. To fix something, you need to be in the context of a particular tool. The Note Move tool handles moving notes between staffs or measures. The Simple Entry tool handles manual drawing of notes. The Expression tool handles tempo markings, dynamics and other performance cues.
That rigidity can be useful when it comes to making detailed work, but it’s inflexible and inconvenient. I kept getting frustrated by having to change tools before doing a task. Cakewalk’s multi-tasking has spoiled me.
The MIDI support is annoyingly unpredictable. The playback speeds up at first, then finally goes into tempo. Keep the program running for too long, and playback gets messed up. I had to restart the program a number of times. Although it can support multiple ports, the playback interface itself doesn’t allow port-specific assignments. I attempted to route each part of my staff to its appropriate MIDI instrument, only to be greeted by a cacophony when channel no. 1 of port A played what was also going to port B.
The documentation is horrible. The context help is done in WinHelp, not HTML Help. And the WinHelp file isn’t even accessible from the Help menu. That menu launches a PDF. I’m not a fan of how the "How to Get There" and "What It Does" sections are laid out. Telling users how to get somewhere should be part of the step-by-step instructions, and a section summarizing the tool’s purpose should be at the very top.
I’m amazed the music manuscript industry depends on Finale for its business. Although I haven’t begun to experiment with the more contemporary notation features of the program, I can say the interface experience prevents me from being curious.