Finale 2014 w/ free book if upgraded by end of SEP '14

[mhschmieder]

Just took advantage of this today and am finishing the installation now.

I bought the earlier 2012 edition of the Finale book and it is excellent. Due to how many changes were made in Finale 2014, I figure a free copy of that $30 update to the third-party book was the extra kick I needed to justify the $139 software upgrade pricing.

Given the bi-annual update timeline, I doubt this means a 2015 edition is going to be announced in a week or two, but certainly most vendors post sales right before updates.

BTW there was no shipping charge for the book. No tax either, unless you opt for the DVD installer. I saw no point as I reviewed the 2012 edition of the 40 page QuickStart that only comes with the shipped version, and it isn't likely to have changed much for Finale 2014, since it only reflects on basic features.

[mhschmieder]

Wow, it won't launch. And I don't have time for deep debugging right now, or searching for old posts on similar problems with Finale 2012 (some of this rings a bell).

First, I had to delete Inspector XL's AU component (but not its VST component), which is just as well as I can no longer use it in anything but BIAS Peak.

Previously, the program had crashed on initial launch, complaining it couldn't find "the" VST plug-in.

Anyway, after deleting Inspector XL, it crashed on LucideGrande.ttf, which I moved to my Desktop for now so it wouldn't search for it (and in case I need to move it back for another app or to apply some known patch that is typical to any Finale installation.

Now, it is crashing deeper than I have the facilities to deal with, unless I can find four or more "spare" hours (unlikely). Lots of logging related to com.plogue.MakeMusicPluginHostingEngine.

Anyone else have this problem? Maybe it's because I upgraded to Mavericks 10.9.5 earlier this week?

[mikehalloran]

Check for duplicate fonts in Font Book.app. Finale 2014 will not launch if any are present.

I just booted it up. All is fine except that I can't load AUs due to an issue with Dragon Dictation. DD requires the audio engine to be 48000 while Finale requires 44100. This means that I am using General MIDI sounds only. F#@&!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

F2014 has SERIOUS movie playback problems. No fix in sight. F2012 or bust.

[mhschmieder]

Thanks; I think the only time I've run Font Book is when a similar problem came up. I've never explored that app or what its main purpose is.

It flashed a duplicate font message with some choices that didn't stay up long enough, so I navigated the menu system and found a command to remove duplicates (slightly indirect, but it was there, several levels removed from the initial click). It removed four duplicates.

Looks like I'll have to reboot the computer now, and maybe find and delete any preferences files that Finale creates, so it starts over in its attempt to boot up. Right now I get the same error message as before, so it probably cached some stuff permanently and needs to be flushed of any history.

MLC, I remember you writing about movie issues with Finale 2014 earlier, but somehow thought it had been resolved. Maybe by the time I have a need for that (my upcoming movie work is more likely to be DP-based due to the type of music involved), Finale 2016 will be here.

[mhschmieder]

After a reboot, and editing the preferences files (I found nothing interesting in there other than a flag for whether it had ever been started, which I set to "no", and the incorrect location in the other preferences file for where the garrison instruments were), it simply does nothing at startup. No errors, no menu bar, no GUI, no spinning ball.

I have to leave in ten minutes so have run out of time to debug this problem further. At least it's the last known problem left, after a day full of non-stop trouble.

[mhschmieder]

Believe it or not, toggling the value of the boolean flag for whether the app has started before, did the trick. Some sort of bootstrapping, I suppose. And even though turning that flag off caused the app to not bring up the GUI but also not to crash, it was necessary as then toggling it on again allowed it to start with a request for the authorization, after which all was OK.

It seems the New Norm is for installers to not work properly on many platforms.

I suppose it's just too much of a moving target these days, and small developers just can't keep up with all the changes and variants in hardware, OS, and overall ecosystem. Things were DEFINITELY simpler and less diversified a few years ago. But as the world moves away from desktop computing, things will only get worse in this regard. Pity the small developers.

[superzozo]

I suppose Fut coins it's just fut 15 coins too much of a moving target these days, and small developers just can't keep up with all the changes and variants in hardware, OS, and overall ecosystem. Things were DEFINITELY simpler and less diversified a few years ago. But as the world moves away from desktop computing, things will only get worse in this regard. Pity the small developers.