In some cases, Finale will appear to launch and then quit unexpectedly, preventing you from using the program. Instead of an error message from Finale itself, you will see the generic crash message from Mac, which can appear when any app crashes.
If you are experiencing the behavior described above, please utilize the steps below to troubleshoot the issue.
An initial test will be to Quit (or Force Quit) Finale, and relaunch Finale. If this resolves your issue you can continue to use Finale. If this does not fix the issue you will want to move onto the next steps.
When Finale is launched, one of the procedures it performs includes checking the contents of the audio plug-ins folder(s) located in the system Library on Macs running OS X. During this check, Finale can sometimes encounter a problem with certain component files that might cause it to crash.
To isolate the exact cause of this kind of crash, you can use a trial and error method to find which components are causing the problem:
- Click on your computer's desktop to switch to Finder.
- From the File menu, choose New Folder.
- Name this folder Components.
- Choose Go > Go to Folder, type in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components, and press RETURN.
- Click and drag this folder labeled Components to your desktop, which automatically copies the file and its contents
- After you've clicked and dragged this folder to your desktop, move all of the items in the original Components folder to the trash, except for the following four files.
- ARIA Player AU.component
- Ambience.component
- SmartMusicSoftSynth.component
- SmartMusicSoftSynth64.component
- Launch Finale.
When you launch Finale now, if Finale does not crash after completing the steps above, one of the component files that was in your system's audio plug-ins components folder is incompatible with Finale and was causing it to crash.
If this is the cause of the crash, to isolate which component(s) are causing the crash, you can quit Finale and move each component file on your desktop back to the original folder in the system Library one at a time, testing to see if Finale is able to launch without crashing after moving each file.
Although we do not have a complete list of incompatible components, we are aware of an audio driver from the Webex application that is known to cause this problem. The following Knowledge Base article can help you resolve that particular problem: Finale Crashing on Startup due to Webex Audio Driver (macOS 13 Ventura)
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