It's not really a bug. Many of the commands that Finale uses are changes to settings and, without the initial setting, Finale doesn't know what to change.

Variations of this complaint have been around since MIDI first became popular in the late 1980s *Finale has been around since 1989). For Finale to do otherwise, it would require real time scene updates—and some DAWs do have that—but that feature needs to be added.

None of us who post here can move this to Feature Requests where it belongs. I will certainly upvote it if you post there. 

Not sure Mike that I understand.

But it sounds like hopeless...

I mean, they have a feature called "add audio track" and the track gets added.

It's just that after that it doesn't remain in sync unless playback commences right from the start.

And it's hard to work on a score like that.

Personally I call that a bug :))

Btw, any alternative ideas as to how to work with a Finale score plus audio?

I'm having this issue, too, but I find it highly curious to be described as "not really a bug."  Like has been noted, if starting playback from the very beginning, the audio track and the score remain largely synchronized as long as playback is continuous. However, if starting playback from a "leftmost measure" at some point within the score other than the beginning, then the playback of the audio track is out of sync with the score.

Before anyone asks, yes, the sampling rate of the audio files is the documented 44.1 kHz.  I've tried disabling Human Playback, and I also performed a reset of the settings, too.

As to whether this is a bug or a feature, Finale already has to keep track of changes and time for when starting playback at an arbitrary point, so it's not like something totally different that Finale has to do.  When starting at a midpoint (even without an audio track), Finale already calculates what the time to that point is, and that time calculation is showing to be consistent regardless of whether playback was started from the beginning or from some other measure (e.g. I have a score where the time at measure 22 is 40 seconds, regardless of where playback was started).

Furthermore, that 40 seconds calculated by Finale is actually an accurate time, because if Finale actually started playing back the audio file at the 40 second mark, this wouldn't be an issue.  Instead, it is starting playback in the audio file around the 36-second mark—off by 4 seconds despite showing the correct score playback time.  Indexing playback to start at 40 seconds in a standard-format audio file should (in theory) be fairly straightforward operation; media players are consistently able to do that without issue.  Bug.

As a bug fix will almost certainly not be forthcoming at this point in Finale's lifecycle, the questions are as follows:

• Is there anyone who does not experience synchronization issues when starting playback at any arbitrary measure in the score?
• If so, are there any particular tricks or workarounds to consistently getting proper behavior?

Additionally, "adopt Dorico" is not an answer here at the present—Dorico lacks similar functionality  There have been multiple different posts in Steinberg forums for a number of years now that have been requesting this such capability, but there is not yet any concrete roadmap as to when such a feature might be implemented (if ever).