I've been having this issue for years. Tried everything... Version 25 is the worst. Finale cracks, pops and clicks its way from machine to machine (macs) and through the last four upgrades/updates. I can't find help anywhere and now tech support for Finale is non-existent. Its quite sad. They said at first it was the template is was using (way back when Finale had live support). I begin a new one from scratch every year now. Even the new templates used for the first time do this. I used to have Sibelius and switched to Finale. Wished I stayed. :-(

Joy,

You can indeed change the buffer size for some types of audio drivers (Windows Versions), but not all.  If the installed hardware drivers allow it you can find it in "MIDI/Audio\Audio Setup".

Some audio device drivers might only provide a single buffer size option, or even be greyed in Finale. 

Try all of the drivers available on your system.  Some might only allow direct audio.  Some might also have WASPI.  Some may also even have ASIO.  If you have ASIO hardware that's usually the best on most systems.  Older/slower PCs might require larger buffers. 

If none of them have adjustable buffer sizes, and you cannot change the buffers in the device's own control panel, and you don't have ASIO drivers, then you could install ASIO4ALL and alter the buffer sizes from there until you find a clean configuration.

ASIO4ALL provides an ASIO back-end for regular WDM drivers.  This makes it possible for non ASIO hardware to work with an ASIO host.  In advanced mode, it also allows you to aggregate independent audio devices into a single driver (great for aggregating inputs, such as a USB mic, but without a common clock signals outputs can drift apart in timing).

Some example scenarios I've personally had with DAWs on my particular system....

I.E.  I have a TASCAM US1200  USB interface that Finale cannot change the buffering; however, I can quit Finale and use the Control Panel that came with the unit to change the ASIO buffer size; then, restart Finale.  In this case the Tascam control panel has an "Audio Performance" drop-down where I can select from a range of settings: 'highest latency' down to 'lowest latency'.  In this case, the 'highest latency' setting gives me the largest audio buffer.

In contrast, I also have an M-AUDIO Delta 1010 audio device.  With this one I can change the ASIO buffer size directly in Finale.

I also have a laptop and use its built in audio device.  There are not ASIO drivers included, but since I want to run a variety of Apps that absolutely demand ASIO compatibility, I keep ASIO4ALL installed.  I use that with Finale as well.  When I direct Finale to use ASIO, it calls up ASIO4ALL in my Windows system tray.  From the control panel in the system tray I can tweak buffer sizes and more.

Occasionally there are even newer/faster multi core systems that use strange system interrupts for audio.  I once had a set of PNY SSD hard drives whose drivers were acting really strange on my older AMD Phenom X6 based rig.  They would  interrupt streaming processes on a regular basis and cause consistent popping sounds in all of my DAWs (not just Finale).  I moved all my sample libraries to different hard drives and the glitches/popping went away.  It wasn't easy to track down the problem, as my system passed all sorts of Latency Monitor checks.  It behaved the same with different audio devices and drivers.  Finally, I ran the Windows System Monitor and noticed a high frequency of regular system interrupts from the PNY disk drivers when audio was being streamed from the PNY drives, and decided to try moving my Garritan Libraries to a different brand/type hard drive.  Getting any files that 'stream in real time' off the PNY SSD drives fixed things in this case.  I now use Samsung SSD, or regular high speed platter drives for any kind of audio files that stream in real time, and my sample playing VSTi plugins are all happy.

I also still run Finale 2012 on a really old single core Laptop with Windows XP and 4gig of memory.  While it can handle an instance or two of the latest version of ARIA (16bit version of course) it does have trouble (it has a small hard drive too), so on that rig I do not even install ARIA/Garritan, and stick with the Finale Smartsynth.

Scott,

I'm on a PC, and have not owned a Mac since the Performa PPC days, but I have a suggestion.

First I'll say that here in PC land Sibelius, Dorico, and Finale all have their share of glitches, bugs, and work-flow issues.  They all have major strong areas, and weaker areas; however, I have found ARIA player and Garritan libraries to be extremely efficient and well behaved in a large variety of hosts capable of running a VSTi plugin.  I use the Garritan Ultimate Collection with Finale, Sibelius, Dorico, CueBase, Bidule and more on the PC with no trouble.  It's the leanest (CPU and memory use) running orchestral plugin I own.

Having said that I suggest:

Get demos of all the leading Scoring apps and load some demanding scores.  Is Finale the only one 'glitching and popping'?

This would be a good and interesting test to see if the problem might not be something deeper (system requirements, device drivers, etc.).  It would also give you a bit of experience with the 'options' currently on the table.

As for Mac world....every DAW out there but Apple's own Logic (and even Logic sometimes has minor issues that require waiting a few days for updates) has serious issues every time Apple decides to push a major update/upgrade.  Apple is very prone to change the rules, and it takes time for all the App developers to fix things.  In the past 2 years alone, my Mac friends have had to roll back or postpone moving to the next Apple OS or their audio software is toast for a while.  It has been everything from Apple breaking the installers, to messing up the graphics card performance so once zippy GUIs slow to a crawl, to yanking support for things like Quicktime support for the PC platform (Mac users often must make content for everyone, so pulling QT for Windows was a big mistake).

Don't get me wrong.  It comes in cycles.  Microsoft isn't perfect either!  It's just that in the past few cycles my Mac associates have been very reluctant to ever upgrade anything from Apple that seems to be working well.  They always try out the new OS releases on a spare machine, and wait out issues being fixed before moving forward in all of their Macs.