When Finale loads playback sounds (even if you do not play back) it counts as a change. MS Word, Adobe Pagemaker, etc. do not have this situation.

Is that supposed to be a justification? It shouldn't count as a change, because the file hasn't changed. But I don't load playback sounds--I use MIDI playback, so that must not be it. This is not rocket science, and Finale at one point behaved correctly.

Bryan Higgins,

We might need some more info from you:

What version of Finale are you using? - v25.5? - or?

What is your operating system? What version?

When you load a file, Finale performs a maintenance action by default, cleaning up file data, checking and converting text (especially for files from other operating systems or older versions of Finale), checking ties and hidden notes, updating the layout and perhaps a number of other operations, so your file most certainly is being changed. I know it seems like an inconvenience but it's not that difficult to get used to simply closing the file without saving if you haven't changed anything.

I can create a default document, save it, then open it any number of times and immediately close it and I'm always asked if I want to save changes. Certainly a file with no music isn't having text converted and ties changed every time. As an experiment I've tried disabling the preferences "Clean up file data", "Automatic update layout", "Automatic music spacing", etc. (not that it's wise to disable those things), and the problem persists. This is a BUG, or perhaps not keeping track of whether the file has changed is just laziness on the Finale programmers' part.

Merely opening a file in a computer program is not supposed to "change" it, unless you're converting from some other program or version, which is not the case here. It's common to want to open a file just to look at something, or to print it. Yes, I've gotten used to keeping track in my head whether I've changed something, but that is error prone. It's not the inconvenience of an extra click that I object to, but rather the possibility of making a mistake by saving the file when I don't need to (which destroys the true last-modified date) or forgetting I made a change and answering "Don't save" since Finale is forced me into that habit. I have occasionally been bitten by this.

Peter, I'm on Windows, but this has been around since at least Finale 2011, in both the Mac and Windows versions; at some point before that, it worked as it should. Somewhere along the line, someone got lazy and just decided to mark everything changed instead of truly keeping track.

I find it isn't that hard to add a date-stamp to each new version of a file in the format yymmdd as in memoryjog171215.musx

Any time I make a change to a file I loaded, I save as a new file in my project folder with the date-stamp changed. That lets me know when I last changed a file, and it gives me a backup to return to and a way to tell when I last changed a file regardless of the Modified stamp in the file menu.

Or, they could fix the problem.

>It's been this way for some years. Every other piece of software I've ever used does the right thing--why can't Finale?<

You apparently do not use Digital Performer. 

>Or, they could fix the problem.<

What problem? I see that you don't like it but I'm not seeing a problem.