From what I've seen here, they are taking as long as two weeks to respond. And blaming it all on Covid, of course.

That has been my experience -- up to two weeks -- and yes, the reason they give is Covid, initially because they were giving priority to educational institutions.   I've submitted several tickets in the last few months and they have all taken much, much longer than 48 hours for a response.   I would have thought / hoped they could have resolved their staffing issue by now.  I have been a user for 25 years and am, for the first time, seriously thinking of abandoning ship.

There has been no phone support for over four years. It ended about a week after 25 was released.

Boycott. They even lost all of my acct. info and I have been a loyal customer since the late ‘80’s.

Barbara, I don’t disagree with you, but, to paraphrase Rhett Butler, “Frankly, my dear, they don’t give a damn.”

Well, to their credit, they got in touch today and resolved my issue, responding within minutes to my followup quesiton.

Thanks all, for sharing your experiences -- I suppose I was panicking a bit when it seemed like there was no response and no way to talk to anyone. (as that seems to be the way of the digital world these days). 

This board gets quite a few of these complaints whenever MM runs a pre-holiday sale. Buy on Thursday, check it out on Friday, find a problem and Submit a request, then wait the 3-day holiday weekend before anyone can look at it.

That said, the few times I’ve needed support, I’ve been ok with the response time.

They got back to me as well and resolved my issue. I was ready to head on out and use another product, but all's well that ends well...expediently.

I'm sincerely glad things have worked out for you both.  They have usually worked out for me as well (in the 25 years I've been a user.)  Until now.  I'm new on v26 and find that my Violin Solo KS1 won't make a simple switch from pizz to arco - it stays pizz.  After waiting two weeks for a response the support rep says I should reset my Preferences, and if that doesn't work to do a complete re-install of Finale.  I was willing to try the first - which didn't work, and told him I wasn't willing to do a re-install (seems too sledge-hammerish for what has to be a simpler problem) and for him to please dig deeper and get back to me with other reasons this could be happening.   I haven't heard back.  In the meantime I've been looking at Steinberg's Dorico.  Pretty amazing, though I will hold out for a few more days since I don't really want to begin learning a new program. 

If you work a lot with lyrics, you will find Finale's lyrics entry/editing system is superior to Dorico's, especially if you import hyphenated text into the lyrics-editing panel and click assign it.

I am primarily an opera / music-theater composer, so yes, I do work a lot ( a whole lot) with lyrics.  So thank you for the heads-up!

I'd say that Click Assignment of a whole load of text in one go is about the only feature that Finale has over Dorico's lyrics, and Dorico has several others that are lacking in Finale. 

>Boycott…

I was ready to head on out and use another product, but all's well that ends well...expediently.<

People often write these things as if it’s, somehow, a threat to the rest of us. It isn’t. If you need to use another product, then do so. Many of us own more than one notation app (4 others in my case). The object is to make music. I agree with MikeR’s post.

well i wasn’t anywhere near boycotting Finale — it’s general very useful and stabile, and I know it well. a problem would have to be truly debilitating to be worth jumping ship and spending weeks or months getting fluent on another app. But it’s worth considering that Finale let a lot of basic problem persist for years until Sibelius showed that certain things could be a lot better and some people really began migrating away. So the prospect of its user base walking is apparently somewhat of a motivation for them.

Since you ask, the common sense not to offer rests or the subsequent notes of a tie as a place for lyrics. (I know when I suggested that Finale do this about 10 years ago, you said it would spoil something in your workflow, but I dare say that's a 'workaround' for another problem.) 

Command V pastes 'the next syllable' from any string of lyrics copied to the Clipboard, which I think is a quicker way of click assignment when it's done per syllable. So you can just hold down Command and go VVVVVV.  

Curly quotes by default! Again, something long asked for.

Italicisation of selected lyrics as a property of the syllable itself; effortless addition of elision symbol; ability to change the verse number or lyrics type of selected lyrics. The fact that being a Chorus, Verse or Translation type actually means something. 

You can select and filter Lyrics in Finale and then drag copy to another staff, but Dorico methods for selection, filtering and copying to other staffs are a lot easier to work with. 

Most significantly, the spacing of syllables and how they affect notes is much better. I don't think I've ever seen a 'runaway' extension line, either.  To say nothing of (gasp) lyrics moving out of the way of low-hanging notes.

Dorico certainly isn't afraid to steal features from Finale if it thinks they will help: there is a "Lyric Window", though the implementation is different; it would be nice if Finale would steal some back.

Thanks, I appreciate that update! And you're right; there are features there that Finale could integrate. Although, I fear it will never happen...

Get off your high horse, Mike Halloran. Quality comes from customer feedback. Period. I give credit when and where it is due.

It's good to have a dream. Unfortunately, we haven't seen enough positive response over the years, to believe that. For the most part, what we've seen is denial of faults and unfulfilled promises.

I guess you can lump me in with Mike H.

I have a lot of positive things to say about Finale. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been using it since the ‘80’s. Hmm. Right now trying to get beams on mandolin tab as it works for guitar, but not for mandolin for some reason. But everything else at the moment is just dandy. Have a nice day, Sunshine!

As do I, a user since the mid-90's.  This thread began with a concern about support, not the product itself. I mentioned above how my support rep wanted me to do a complete re-install of Finale (v26) because for some reason a violin pizz was not switching to arco.  I found what was wrong this morning: I was using a Human Playback Preferences Set I created a few weeks ago when I was playing around with VSL Voices, which obviously interferes with Finale's interpretation of pizz and arco.  I simply changed it back to "Default Prefs" and everything is good.   A complete re-install of Finale would have worked but for the wrong reason: it would have used all the Default settings -- and both I and my support rep would have thought it was due to a 'bad installation.'  I just sent him an explanation of the fix so hopefully the next user with this problem will get better guidance.