MOTUnation.com

Hello.

I wanted to upgrade from Finale 2012 to Finale 25, but now I'm not sure anymore. It seems Make Music is really following the Apple trend of dumbing down everything they can, to the professional user demise.

I see they not only got rid of the movie window and now you need a DAW to score against video (what are they thinking!), but now you can't even scan or import Tiffs??

Anything else I should know about the dumbed down Finale 25?

Also, before digging out from the basement a scanner I have (that probably doesn't work), I'm really curious if the scanning/importing (from engraved scores) ever worked reliably.
What I would expect, is that I would scan some orchestral score, and Finale would import it beautifully, with no need to do much further editing. Did it really recognize all the staves and different instruments and notes and articulations?

From 0 to 10, how would you rate this feature before they took it out?

Maybe they killed it because it never worked? If so, then it wouldn't be too much of a loss obviously, but I'd like to know because it seems that instead of benefiting from the upgrade I would loose more features...

What's so great about 2014 or 25 that 2012 doesn't have? Should I upgrade?

Oh, it looks like they ALSO got rid of the community forum??? And now they replaced it with a crippled forum version? What's going on with Make Music?

Is Sibelius any better? I was very good at Finale, and I think I can remember everything quickly, so thinking about switching to an alien app would be sort of annoying. And most probably, Sibelius has its own set of issues. Thoughts?

Thanks!

Did SmartScore Lite ever work? I’m among the many who say, Not really. I upgraded to SmartScore Pro, then X2 Pro years ago.

Musitek’s new Music-to-XML app was to have been included but some people complained and lawyers caused it to be pulled from the final release. Like SS X2 Pro, it import lyrics and expressions.

Here is a discussion with more detail, links etc..

https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/ ... TIF-to-XML

I've used the scanning feature in Finale (pre F25) for years. It's not flawless, but it converts reasonably well if you don't mind some editing. It's not really that bad.

And yes, it was removed from F25 along with the movie window, making F25 and all future updates useless to me, personally.

I don't have Finale 2012 but SmartScore Lite still works in Finale 2011 over El Capitan and in 2014.5 over High Sierra.

You should be able use it within 2012, save the file and open it in 25 or export as MusicXML.

Never having had 2012, I have no way of testing it in High Sierra. 2011 no longer opens as of OS 10.13.

Scanning within the app on a Mac hasn't really worked since OS 10.6—and not at all since 10.7, of course. Use Image Capture.app to create the .tif files and then use Smart Score Lite within Finale 2014.5 or earlier to import them.

The same goes for SS X2 Pro while the new Music-to-XML app does not have scanning — it converts your scan to MusicXML.

I stand corrected. I always scanned and created the OCR candidates in other apps. The *recognition* itself is what I was referring to.

Thanks, guys!

I don't mind doing some editing of the scanned file. As long as it takes less time than entering everything manually, of course...

One of my 2 authorizations is in a Laptop with Sierra. I got instant crashes by simply inserting a note in a staff or by pressing the play button in the transport.
Setting Humanize to "none", and setting it to NOT play through AU seems to remedy things. I'm already on the 3rd tutorial. Things are starting to come back, but a lot has changed, and not everything for the better.

I can only keep dreaming about MOTU coming up with a KILLER notation app that is perfectly connected to DP... That would be beauuuuuutiful! It's not like they don't have the experience or expertise to do it. Just implement into DP something between Finale and Dorito...

When you. Lean up your scans, remove all text and none basic notes as that will speed up the import and it will be more accurate.