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).

In some further digging, it appears Finale has a bug where instead of using the shown, configured sample rate found in the MIDI/Audio > Device Setup > Audio Setup dialog, Finale is assuming somewhere within its code that the output sample rate is 44100 Hz (regardless of the configuration value shown).  However, by manually configuring the audio output device to a 44100 sample rate within the Windows settings, it appears we can work around this issue.

I have posted more details a potential workaround in a separate thread, as this workaround appears to address multiple reported issues.  It's possible multiple other things might need to line up exactly, even beyond what is covered in that post, but this is what currently seems to mitigate the issue for me.

Posting in the hope that this might be of help to Eran and others….

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?

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.

As I've explained, that is not how Finale works. Not saying that it shouldn't have been changed but that would require a lot of code—easy only for those not doing it as the old saying goes. Really, there's nothing to fix. It was never a DAW and adding the one audio track never changed this. The workaround was sync'ing with DAWs via Rewire—now gone—and sync'ing via MIDI but this only works in one direction. with Finale being the Master. This still works.

Additionally, "adopt Dorico" is not an answer here at the present—Dorico lacks similar functionality 

Yamaha is working on this with Cubase in the same way that ProTools integrates with Sibelius and Fender is trying with StudioOne and Notion. Those will happen eventually. 

 However, by manually configuring the audio output device to a 44100 sample rate within the Windows settings, it appears we can work around this issue.

This issue went away in the macOS with Finale 25.4. It was an absolute PIA up till then. Having certain apps that only worked in 48k while Finale was 44.1 only... I had to reboot after every time I used Finale — don't miss that at all.

I'm not sure I'm following this, or how some internal code change within Finale might be needed?  Both the problem and the workaround are identified in this other thread that I linked to.

Following those steps in that thread, I am no longer experiencing the issue.  Granted, it does restrict the output sample rate to only 44100 Hz when using an audio track with Finale, so if other software has conflicting requirements, then that might be more of an issue, but that's not an issue in my current setup (and, if an output sampling rate change were to be needed, it is applying in Windows without a reboot, so it sounds like at least that part might be better now, lol).

As reference, this is with the very last version of Finale for Windows, version 27.4.1.110.