Finale 2010 Continues to suck out loud
1. Minor annoyance: When Finale 2010 (Mac) is launched, a dialogue box pops up, prompting me to download the latest ‘upgrade’. Click on the upgrade button, and the browser opens a page with an update to Finale 2011. Not Finale 2010. Wasting my time.
2. Pet Peeve: creating new measure number regions seems like an easy task, but it’s not. What’s not in the manual is, Region 2 won’t start with measure number 1 until you first delete Region 1, then re-create Region 1, then create Region 2. Thanks, Finale 2010.
3. Major Psychotic F****** Hatred: Finale makes a new version each year, which is NOT backwards compatible. I have Finale 2009 at work, and 2010 at home. Finale 2009 cannot read 2010 files. I refuse to believe that the file formats are THAT much different. If Microsoft Office 2003 can read MS Office 2007 files with a simple plug-in, or in 2007 use “Save As (insert older format here)”, why can’t the idiots who create Finale do that? The only workaround that I know of, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is to save as a MIDI file. Any version of Finale can open MIDI files. However, all formatting is lost (ties, expressions, etc) in a MIDI file. Thanks for the forced upgrade path! Way to keep the customer in mind!
4. Help Feature, FTW: Click on the Help menu item, and a box appears, apparently for you to type a search query into. One would think anything could be typed in there and searched for, such as “note”. Nope. Only items in the programs menus can be searched for. Try typing an ‘n’, as in note head. The search box won’t accept an ‘n’ as input, because there is no menu item in the program starting with the letter ‘n’.