UPDATE: Per Finale's website on 8/27/2024 @ 5:30 PM ET, authorizations will remain available indefinitely!
Composers, arrangers, orchestrators and educators all woke up to shocking news on Monday, August 26, 2014. Finale, the industry standard for music notation software, is calling it quits! Like many other people across the world, our team has been processing this information slowly as we come to terms with what this means. So what does it mean?
Per MakeMusic’s letter, there will be no new versions of Finale released ever again. Additionally, as of August 2025, all technical support for any version of Finale will cease as will the ability for people to authorize Finale on any new devices. So once August 2025 hits, people can still use Finale if it’s on their computer. But they absolutely should not update their operating systems and should anything go wrong with the software, there will be no one to help fix it. Basically, Finale users have one year to learn and switch to a new program.
This is unfortunate news for anyone looking to create new music. Additionally, it is also terrible news for those who have written a lot of music in the past, using Finale. All of their work was created using a program that will essentially be defunct, one year from now. So not only do Finale users have one year to find a new program to write music, they also only have one year to preserve all of their existing music in a different way. The easiest solution is to export everything to PDFs (something most people have already done). However, this does not allow people to edit the music down the road if needed. The more difficult solution is to export their music out of Finale using the infamous .XML file, and import it into a new program such as Sibelius or Dorico. On paper, this sounds great. But as anyone who has used XML files knows, this is a clunky, tedious and time consuming process. For a large music publishing company that has published thousands of pieces of music using Finale, this news is absolutely devastating.
Our hearts go out to everyone who is affected by this unexpected announcement. We know that livelihoods are at stake and creatives everywhere will have to reinvent their processes on some level. We wanted to write this post to let everyone know how this news will affect our JCM products and clients moving forward.
The bad news is that Jeff is a 20 year Finale veteran. He started using the program in 2004 as a freshman in high school. The vast majority of his shows on our website were written using Finale and currently exist in that program. However, there is also good news! First and foremost, the majority of the other creative personnel and editors on our team are primarily Sibelius users. So for the majority of our team, work will continue as usual. Second, about two years ago, our team decided that we would start migrating towards Sibelius as our primary notation software. We did this because in the marching arts, Sibelius is the most commonly used program and we wanted to be able to collaborate with others without dealing with pesky XML conversions. We knew this would be a long process but we wanted to at least start the process of becoming fluent in both programs. We have had great success with this and currently, we tend to function and exist fairly consistently in both programs.
With all of that being said, in light of today’s announcement from MakeMusic, JCM will be proceeding forward using Sibelius as our primary notation software for composing, arranging and publishing our music. We have multiple people on our team who are Sibelius guru’s who will undoubtedly be in charge of some software training for the rest of us in the near future! We also have a plan in place, to preserve all 150+ shows that currently exist in Finale. This will be a lengthy process that will extend beyond August of 2025, but rest assured; no music will be lost.
So that’s where we’re at! At the end of the day, we have no plans to change our approach to what we do. We will still be producing the same volume of music for the marching arts that is fun to play, fun to watch and competitive! We’ve got some behind the scenes logistics and adjustments to iron out, but we’ve got it under control and are excited to release our 2025 indoor catalog in the coming months, followed by our 2025 fall catalog! Thank you for all of your love and support and we give our best to all of those who were affected by today’s news release from MakeMusic.
- The JCM Team