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I just want to report that, after following Mike Halloran's instructions, I am now happily running Finale 2012 in El Capitán.

Now I'll see if I can open these ancient Finale files... They're from the late 90s!

Thank you!

It should work but, if not, head over to the support link I gave earlier. There are a number of issues with old Finale files that can get in the way, all surmountable.

I had to reinstall OS 10.13.1 and was getting the Java SDK... error. Unlike OS 10.13, the 2015-001 installer wasn't working.

Apple has a new installer for the legacy JRE 6, 2017-001 for High Sierra. This is backwards compatible to OS 10.7.

https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1572?locale=en_US

Besides Finale 2014.5 and earlier, Adobe CS6 and other 32bit apps still require JRE 6.

I had to use that one recently when I upgraded my work machine to High Sierra (required due to being a software developer and needing to see problems that our users see), as Oxygen XML Editor never got modified to use newer Java or to package Oracle's Java with the app (not sure why -- they have a huge developer team and I am a team of "one" plus occasional DevOps support, and it wasn't that big of a deal).

Apple keeps threatening to pull support, but Adobe also depends on Apple's Java 6 (which has dependencies on some OS core that Apple didn't hand off to Oracle), for some functionality in Illustrator (I think maybe some of the XML support). Java 9 (recently released) solves these issues but hasn't been widely adopted yet as it requires developers to make MAJOR structural changes as Java now uses modules, similar to the "dylib" and "dll" approach of Objective-C and C++.

As for Finale, probably they are using Java technology for Music XML related functionality.

As none of the mentioned apps use Java for GUI stuff, there's not such a strong need for the vendors to update those parts of their apps; hence the tendency for them to run into this issue unique to macOS where the vendor changed as well as the packaging and installation strategy (this was intentional, to avoid potential incompatibilities between Apple's and Oracle's Java as well as accidental deletion of one when installing the other).

mhschmieder wrote:...
As for Finale, probably they are using Java technology for Music XML related functionality...

Yes, I peeked under the hood to satisfy my curiosity and see it but Finale 25 is 64 bit and does not require the JRE 6.