Arggh!
/After my sad news on Monday, I ended the post with two bits of good news. And then Finale announced it was shutting down.
A drill press, which has nothing to do with this section of the post, but it looks better up top, don’t you think?
For those who are blissfully unaware of the music things, Finale is one of the major pieces of music writing software. It’s been Broadway’s standard for decades, and I started using it at version 1.
Yesterday the company announced it was done, finis, kaput. As of yesterday, you cannot download, buy, authorize, or reauthorize Finale 27. It will continue to run on your computer — until it doesn’t.
Here’s the deal: Thirty years later I have scores of files that, if anything happens to my Finale, will be inaccessible forever. No other programs can read Finale’s proprietary .musx files. Now imagine all of Broadway’s records, real composers’ archives, whole libraries of music. You see the problem.
Finale has cut a deal with another company to give us all a huge discount on Dorico, the next best thing (according to my panicked research), and they’ve backtracked on some of their more Procrustean dictates, but it’s still a pain in the butt. For each and every file on my laptop, I must open it, clean up the older ones, and then export the file as a .mxl file, then import it into Dorico and hope for the best.
I have only done this twice so far, once with one of the Ten Little Waltzes and once with “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way.” The results are not inspiring. Dorico’s playback abilities pale in comparison to Finale’s, and for someone like me whose only chance to hear their music is via the computer, that’s painful.
It’s only been a couple of days, and I’m sure that somebody’s already working on an app to convert .musx files into something betterer, but now at age 70 I have to learn an entirely alien music program or risk losing every single note of music I’ve ever written, not to mention composing new stuff.
Oh well. This is, if nothing else, a spur for me to go ahead and finish Ten Little Waltzes, right?
The other bit of bad news was that my drill press is borked. I had lugged it out to continue working on the prototype of my Rage Against the Night, and because of my substandard working conditions, the shaft of the drill bit did something up in the works so that the vise grips will no longer descend all the way.
At least this one is fixable. I think? I hope.
