My suggestion: get it sooner rather than later and start using it. Learning it by working with it on an actual score has been helpful and I find I do not miss Finale at all. Some things are much better, some things are about the same, a few things are challenging but once learned, are not problematic. Honestly, all the times I was pushing back on Dorico users who were telling me to make a switch, I was engaging in magical thinking by assuming Finale would at least continue to have occasional bug fixes and minor additions. Had I switched, I would not have had anywhere near the level of annoyances I’ve had with Finale over the past 2-3 years. And it would have saved me some significant $ purchases of some plugins that, in a few cases, were not really that helpful in the end.

For what it's worth, I never comment in these community sections, but I wanted to say, Dorico is incredible. It's everything I've wanted to come easily from Finale, but didn't. For anyone on the fence, I highly encourage switching over as the cross grade discount for the Pro version is quite affordable and gets you a lot for your money. I couldn't be happier with it myself.

You're speaking about a very specific use case you have that allegedly Dorico can't handle. I can't speak to graphics since in all my 30+ years of using Finale, I've never had to do that. But I'm sure if you go onto the Dorico forum, someone may be able to provide you with a workaround. 

I'm currently working on my first composition in Dorico and honestly, it's going very well. Some things have been soooo much faster and easier than with the late lamented Finale. I never have to input rests. Hitting R to repeat selected notes is a godsend. 

And I use large time signatures routinely (indeed, the biggest issue I have with importing from Finale via MXML is the fact that large time signatures don't apply to every staff so it causes a minor issue when imported. Whereas in Finale I had to mess around with changing numbers and guesstimating how that would affect the location of each number, it's much more straightforward in Dorico. This was easy to do:

But hey, if Sibelius works better for you, then use Sibelius. I could sit around and kvetch about what thing I could do in Finale and can't do as easily in Dorico, but as I've gotten more facile with Dorico, I'm finding there is much more I can do with Dorico than I could have done with Finale, and certainly more simply. All the time wasted with futzing with various plugins, various palettes and subpalettes in Finale is time I can now use to actually compose. Yes there remain some challenges, but every challenge I've had so far was easily dealt with either by reading the manual, watching a video or very importantly, getting a quick response from someone in their community forum. Unlike this forum where few people really post and even fewer provide helpful responses, the Dorico forum is highly trafficked. And highly useful. 

Good luck. Stay positive.

In my case I came to Dorico after two changes - I used to use Finale from 2006-2012 and then moved to Sibelius 7 in 2012, just a few months before they let go of their team.

I originally moved from Finale because I was notating a particularly different score in Finale (modernist, with box notation, clusters, etc.) where bugs caused me to spend days longer on the score. I would be working on page 10 and while I was doing stuff on page 10 all day, page 5 would get completely messed up even though I never touched it. It was the most frustrating experience of my life and was the final straw that had me move to Sibelius for the next piece.

I was fairly happy on Sibelius - definitely much happier than on Finale. When Avid got rid of the Sibelius team, it was for financial reasons - other parts of Avid were losing money, and they saw that they had an expensive London UK office full of well paid people just developing Sibelius and laid them all off. For several years after this, nothing was happening with Sibelius. They started charging people for subscriptions and were still doing absolutely nothing. I refused to move to the subscription model because I didn't want to pay them yearly to not do anything. I moved to Dorico around 2018, at which point Sibelius had become so unstable on my computer that it was crashing every 5 minutes and I didn't want to be stuck moving to the new version. At this time, Dorico wasn't really quite ready for me to start using (it was missing a few features I needed) but it was stable but I didn't want to start paying Avid yearly just to get Sibelius not crashing again.

Moving from Finale to Sibelius was quite easy for me, I learned in a few weeks - I learned from the excellent documentation tutorial that came with Sibelius. Moving to Dorico was harder only because they didn't have the tutorials yet in 2018 (but do now in the form of the First Steps Guide). But my speed of getting a completed score went up with each change of program - going from Finale to Sibelius, I would get a completed, polished score done much more quickly with less time investment. Going up from Sibelius to Dorico, there was also a noticeable time improvement where I was able to get scores done to the same quality with less time investment due to the feature set. By this point I am very efficient in Dorico and am able to engrave the same score much faster than I ever could in Sibelius or Finale (each of which I had used for 6 years).

By this point I am very efficient in Dorico and am able to engrave the same score much faster than I ever could in Sibelius or Finale (each of which I had used for 6 years).

I'm finding much the same. I'm nearly done with a 40+-minute work that a) I perhaps would not have composed right now were it not for it being a good way to migrate to Dorico and learn more as I go (I started with reading the manual, literally, and viewing the videos) and b) probably was faster and more efficient to notate in Dorico than Finale, even with the learning curve.

“With Dorico, you will receive ongoing development, product updates, and long-term support. “

Had we gotten this from Finale, they might not be going away…

Nessa,
I have completed my little basic trial of the top notation software programs. I did the cross-platform upgrade for Dorico and Sibelius. Of course, the free MuseScore has been on my computer for a very long time now.

Capella and Lily Pond, ah, no, not even in the same zip code as the above. Plus there are several others that are basically a joke.

First after my consideration I have concluded Finale with Perfect Layout is still the best notation product on the planet. Make Music has done a huge disservice to the music community, IMHO, by discontinuing it. Sell it if nothing else and let someone take it over. Besides what harm would it do to keep it active on the MM website as long until no one ever bought it?

Anyway, my takeaway is Sibelius is the winner and clear choice to move from Finale. It is the most Finale like. However, it also suffers from the final score ready for print out even though it claims” Magnetic Layout”. Perhaps Jan Angermüller can do his magic for Sibelius as he did for Finale.

MuseScore isn’t ready yet, but they claim a lot of Finale like features in MuseScore 5. MuseScore 4 has the best sound by far. We’ll see what’s in 5.

Now Dorico and boy was I disappointed. It is the most convoluted mess I have ever seen or worked with, and I am an advanced Photoshop user. There is nothing logical in it. It makes the simplest of tasks difficult hidden deep in menus or impossible. I spent two of the most frustrating weeks constantly back and forth with Dorico support (they are wonderful) and the web site trying to get a hold of this software. Yeah, I got a score done except for the drum set, OK, but what a mess. I read a review by a publisher, he summed it up saying there are a 100 things that Finale does that Dorico doesn't. One is no full page graphic. Large time sigs is a mess too. Not possible unless it is a group. I still urge you to take advantage of the cross platform upgrade because who knows how this thing turns out

One tutorial and the Quick Reference sheet and I was up and running in Sibelius in about an hour. It has some very nice features that I wish Finale had but alas never will now. Sibelius also has the cross platform offer and I urge you to take advantage of it too.

My plan is still to keep Finale as long as possible and at my age that’s not going to be a huge problem. Sibelius is my choice, but it is owned by a company that isn’t any better or have any better fiduciary responsibility, or integrity, than Make Music has. Plus, a lot of legacy code just like Finale. So here we are, long live Finale without MM.

David M,

I agree on the way Dorico does parts. It's almost worth it to XML a score in to Dorico just to have it make the parts.

I'm sure, but much of my music also has a lot of complexities, and I'm assuming that since I could do this in Finale, it would be fine in Dorico and likely Sibelius. Just depends on how much effort one wants to make. I like the popovers in Dorico to change time signatures, etc. Much quicker than Finale, TBH. 

David Toub - I saw a video of your composition This Piece Intentionally Left Blank played by cello and pitched percussion. I really liked that performance of it, kind of zenmerizing to listen to...and to watch. 

Awww...thank you so much! That group, from the University of Tennessee, Martin, just found the work on my web site and went with it. They did an amazing job! 

Back to the OP, the crossgrade will be around for as long as it makes sense for Yamaha to offer it. No one knows how long that will be.

AVID has its own crossgrade offers going: $149 for a Sibelius permanent license or $99 for subscription. How long? Again, we don't know.

Brief update - Dorico has conceded the superiority of Finale (kidding, but they have acknowledged the importance of its new crossgrade users) by making it possible to input notes in a native Finale fashion in the Dorico 5.1.6 update. If you're evaluating or trialing Dorico, or like me you rolled the dice on Dorico yet found the lack of this capability a glaring shortcoming, make sure you watch the release video to see how to configure this. To all the Finale devotées in this thread, find the direction forward that maximizes your creativity and output, which might be Sibelius - who has their own attractive crossgrade price - or Muse, which has no price at all but is still only playing AA ball. These developers are competing to attract us. 

Which part has changed-my being cool or writing interesting music? Inquiring minds want to know.

In terms of objectivity, you do realize you're totally not, right?

Brief update - Dorico has conceded the superiority of Finale by making it possible to input notes the Finale way in the Dorico 5.1.6 update. If you're evaluating or trialing Dorico, or like me you rolled the dice on Dorico yet found the lack of this capability a glaring shortcoming, make sure you watch the release video to see how to configure this.

TBH, I'm not sure I'm understanding the significance of the new update, since I found I could easily move notes up and down a half-step or a whole step or an octave just by using opt-arrow, shift-opt-arrow, and opt-cmd-arrow (on a Mac) and I also do what I did in Finale, which was often to simply drag the note up or down to change pitch. The new update gives the option of remapping the arrow keys to move pitches a half-step in either direction, but then you can't move the caret to a different staff using the arrow keys (you'd have to use opt-arrow instead). I've gotten to rather like hitting shift-arrow to enter notes in multiple staves simultaneously, which is a nice feature I wished Finale had, so for me, I'm not remapping the keys. Dorico already had speedy entry in many ways, such as pitch before duration, and duration before pitch amounts to speedy entry with the caps lock on, which I often did to enter runs of notes in Finale. 

Well of course not how could I possibly be right. Oh, lets see, you were a guy like motet that complained about Finale for a long time. Loudly I might affirm.  Now you found your holy grail and of course it has no issues and is wonderful. It's good you found your peace but there are lots of folks that think the way I do, that Dorico isn't all that wonderful and is a mess to learn.

Dorico knows that. Dorico has heard from people like me and that why they come out with the more Speedy Entry, Finale like, note input. Now it's your turn spin it anyway you deem necessary to prove it to yourself you made the right decision in going Dorico.

Dude, I'm not spinning anything. I think you're projecting; you're the one who's constantly reassuring yourself that Finale is totally awesome and everything else largely sucks. I stuck with Finale for over 30 years; if MM hadn't abandoned it and if it didn't have bugs and quirks that clearly will never be addressed, I'd still be using Finale. But it's not rational, in my opinion, to keep using something that is never going to be improved, has many issues (not for you, since you're apparently blessed, but I have had many problems rear their ugly heads when using Finale of late), and is now a bit less powerful than some of the alternatives. 

I get it; your world has been rocked and change is hard. Move on. Most of us have. 

The crossgrade is purchased from the MakeMusic score and they have promised one year authentication - but there is no deadline published. The best I see officially is:

<quote>

MakeMusic will continue providing technical support for Finale v27.4.1 on supported operating systems through August 25th, 2025. This technical support will not extend to Sequoia.

For the best results, we recommend crossgrading to Dorico Pro. With Dorico, you will receive ongoing development, product updates, and long-term support. Finale users making the switch can purchase Dorico Pro for just $149:

Thanks all
:-)
Vanessa

Vanessa, the general consensus had seemed to be that the crossgrade offer would be at least 60 days from its original announcement, since the Dorico trial is 60 days from download and first use. I suspect it will be even a bit longer than that, but certainly at least 60 days from when Finale announced.

When does the "limited time offer" end? What is the deadline date to cross over to Dorico? Why is this date not more clearly given?? 

“When does the "limited time offer" end? What is the deadline date to cross over to Dorico? Why is this date not more clearly given?? ”

Why should it be? Better from a business perspective to keep it open. The amount of kvetching by us former Finale users is getting old. No one owes us anything (other than MM, who messed up for years by abandoning their once star product). Read my response above. That’s all I could say about it.

They also did say that they aren't going to take the offer away without some warning first, so I would expect plenty of advance notice.

Thanks, all,

I'll use Finale for as long as I can.
Hopefully, as Michael stated, Dorico will give us some kind of final alert.

:-)
Vanessa

Good points, David
Thank you,
:-)
Vanessa

Dorico no full page graphic. And Dorico support says no plans for adding feature any time soon.

It's hard to see the actual page edge but in Dorico you can't have different margins on different
pages. You can set up what Dorico calls a "flow" but it is more like an additional movement or act in 
a play than a score thing.

Lare time sigs are a mess too, if that's important to you.

You see the drum Drum set isn't complete. Dorico is doing a second hour+ long live video to try and explain how to do it. Another thing that was overly difficult. They admit it was basically designed for you to use a midi controller but that you can use a computer keyboard just not as easily or quickly.

All these and most anything else is far easier in Sibelius than Dorico and that is truly odd since the originator of Dorico was one of the fired programmers from Sibelius, Daniel Spreadbury.

Going pretty well here, too. I have my seven biggest pieces moved over, and am working on a suite of brass and organ arrangements. Only minor tweaks to the score required, and the parts, omg the parts, are perfect right out of the box. Last spring I took a course at a nearby college and got a solid introduction to Sibelius there - and Ernest is right, Sibelius feels immediately familiar (including some of Finale's deficiencies); the learning curve was barely uphill. Dorico is another world by comparison but once I got into it, things in Finale that used to eat up the clock are amazingly easy. Dorico 5 is more complex than previous editions because it does things it couldn't before. [edit: For now I will continue to use FInale for compositional sketches, because it is simply easier to write or doodle in. Dorico is much, much better at finishing. I will eventually get to doodling stage there, too, and I might try MuseStudio for that.]

David T,

The style of music you write would be easy in any program as long as it did copy and paste. That would be a snap in Sibelius.

Not sure to whom you're referring in terms of being a "fanboy," but TBH, I purchased Perfect Layout (first the Silver version and then Gold to try to have a bit more control) largely on your "fanboy" recommendations, EB ;-) 

BTW--Ernie...

You have mentioned several times the need to place a full page graphic into a score.

Have you considered doing so via Adobe Acrobat? Simple enough to add a blank page to your PDF score and insert the graphic.
:-)
Vanessa

Yes I know there are workarounds. It just shows another shortcoming with Dorico that Finale had.