#FINALE PRINTMUSIC SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#

Sibelius is now sold through Avid who became owners of the software in 2006. The number of features now available to composers is more than many will ever need but most like to have available at their fingertips.

With both software packages, the possibilities in terms of notation and playback are extraordinarily good. This has made it a rival of Sibelius with composers and publishers alike for many years. Like Sibelius, Finale is written to produce exceptional scores ranging from simple piano scores through to compositions for a one-hundred strong symphony orchestra. Phil Farrand is credited as the first author of Finale that is currently in its twenty-sixth incarnation. It is often assumed that Sibelius was the first notation software but Finale reached the notation market first in 1988 with versions for both Windows and Macintosh computers. This did not make a significant impact on the popularity of Sibelius that was soon adopted by many leading composers and publishing houses, celebrated for its ease of use, functionality, stability, and beautiful printed scores. In these very first years of Sibelius, it ran only on Windows and Risk computers, only a little later making its way onto the Macintosh computers.

The result was Sibelius, named after the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. These guys had had enough of writing out music by hand and decided, very profitably as it turns out, to design a piece of software that could make the task less laborious. Sibelius was the first notation program I spent money on back in 1993 when it was first released by Cambridge based brothers Jonathan and Ben Finn. For this article, I am going to take a look at two of the leading software programs that are in the first category that musical notation. These are ones designed to produce professional-looking scores, the same as you would buy from a publisher, and those created to produce ‘sequenced’ compositions that use virtual instruments. Essentially, there are two different types of software programs in common use amongst composers today.

Finale printmusic software