Finale is the head of MakeMusic's notation family of entry-level Print Music, mid-range Allegro and song-writing favorite, Finale Guitar. A fierce competitor to Sibelius, it is designed for arranging, composing and printing music and offers a number of tools for playback as well.
Finale 2006 has a host of features, many of which are designed to give you more realistic playback of your scores. For example, Finale 2006 includes more than 100 sounds from the popular Garritan Personal Orchestra library to provide authentic playback to your scores. Advanced reverb is also included, and the Human Playback capabilities respond to legato and instrumental techniques. The "Studio View" mixer allows you to solo, mute and adjust each instrument's level on playback.
In addition to support for Kontakt Player included with the Garritan library, Finale will support virtually any Native Instruments product, including Kontakt, Kompakt and Reaktor.
Tempo Tap is also a feature for playback that allows you to "conduct" the performance. Much like the "NTEMPO" feature in Notion, you can enter a rhythm track into Finale and then tap the rhythm during playback - Finale will follow your tempo so you can control rit, accelerandos and any other tempo changes.
Other helpful features include a chord analysis tool, "handbells used" chart, Orff Instruments, along with split-measures, including mid-measure repeats.
We really are excited about the handbell and Orff features (these are great, especially for teachers!) However, the biggest hurrah went up for the support of integrating Native Instrument's line of samplers and soft synths directly into Finale. Yes, we really would have liked to have seen any VST instrument work with Finale, but with access to any NI based soft synth or sampler player, the majority of the products we would want to use will now integrate directly into Finale. Not only can we use the affordable but great sounding Kompakt, the full Kontakt, Reaktor and other NI products, but many of the current synths and samplers on the market use Kontakt Player so those will work as well, including East West's Symphonic Orchestra series.
The "Tempo Tap" feature is quite nifty too, and will be great when used with a suitable soft-synth for playback. However, if playback isn't your main concern, then you still might find some of the tools, such as mid-measure repeats and split measures to be useful. (Personally, I just gave up on writing music that had either of these - sure repeats save paper, but what musician hasn't missed a repeat at least once in their life?!)
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This is truly a great program. I have been a Finale user for 10 years or more. The final printout is also truly first class. A very professional product. This product can do so much more than the leading competition but yes it requires more work to get there. Be warned about the minimum system requirements. I had problems with playback and was advised by Finale that to use this technology, 1 gig o...
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I have been using Finale for 19 years now. I got up to Finale 2006 and then Makemusic started having some problems. So, I stuck with 2006 for 3 years. Eventually I upgraded to 2009 and now I have 2010. I use Finale almost every day of my life. Many people that say Sibelius is easier to use have never taken the time to properly use Finale. For most things, Finale is intuitive. (It wasn't always...
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I love Finale. I use it mainly for writting music. Playback has limited value in Finale for me because for this I use specialized programs (Like ProTools and Digital Performer).
The main grip I have with Finale since version 2008 is that you can imoport only one audio clip.
I am still using Finale version 2001 although I have them all since version 1.0 from 20 years ago!
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This can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. At first I was fine with the program, with basic things I needed to do, but then when it got to harder, more complex things, this just proved to be pretty on the outside, but horrible within. It's not user-friendly at all, as alot of the complex things require long periods of time searching in their already small enough "manual"....
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Good for scoring simplistic music but not recommended for more refined orchestrations and choral arrangements. Complex recipes make even the simplest tasks very, very time-consuming. Do you want to spend time and frustration searching for help, *or* do you want to get the notation finished before the original inspiration is gone? Give Finale a few more years and it will be great.
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