A poll in the VI-Control forum has c. 60% moving to Dorico; 16% to MuseScore; 8% to Sibelius; and 10% staying with Finale until something breaks/dies. (Sample of 112.)

There was already a flow of people moving to Dorico well before Finale's demise (of which I am one), who were fortunate enough to learn it without any sense of time pressure or panic; because it makes so many things easier, and includes all kinds of unique functions. And who knows what the next version will bring?

MuseScore is also developing fast, and dealing with its limitations and lacunae: you can produce very acceptable scores already, if you know what a score ought to look like. I suspect that for many, the price and feature set is entirely sufficient, or even preferable.

Lilypond produces excellent if slightly sterile notation and "can do anything"; but if you don't like or get the coding environment, then it won't appeal.

All the scores I've seen in Capella on CPDL are hideous; but I wouldn't recommend relying on any of the smaller companies, who don't have the commercial backing or userbase to develop. 

Ben,

I have no doubt Dorico has a huge increase in folks trying and buying the app. After all MM is pushing them to it. I got two very nice looking scores done in Dorico and, yes, I do still have some hair left after pulling out most of it trying to master Dorico. I am also sure it will advance and is probably the logical choice for new and young composers but that's only until we see what MuseScore 5 has to offer. Dorico remains the most convoluterapp I have ever tried to use. Sibelius is the easiest one to transfer to from Finale. I entered the same two score in SIbelius without too many bumps.

Sibelius suffers the exact same problem that Finale does.It is old legacy code and development to new features, bug fixes, etc., is slow to nonexistent. And the poor support from Avid is similar to what we all saw with MM.

At KU where I am still active, most Music Ed students use MuseScore even though the university is a Sibelius school. The only ones that really do Sibelius are the theory students basically. My local school district #231 was a Finale district for its 12 high school music teachers. They are trending towards Sibelius. You see I am old enough to not need a long term solution.

I don't see Avid as any better than Make Music. And I can see Sibelius suffering the same idiotic fate as MM did to Finale. It costs MM virtually nothing and really makes no sense to not just let Finale plug along until no one bought it. Perhaps a few plugin upgrades and needed OS upgrades for the Mac folks but that's all they needed to do.

BTW, a Dorico "Quick Reference Card" which you can d/l from Steinberg is three pages long. Hardy a "quick" reference sheet. And the "Popover" sheet(s) is 15 pages long.

And I repeat this ...

 Dorico’s best feature is its support, and its worst feature is its support. Like Dorico and all is golden. Criticize Dorice and you become a pariah. 

Look makes no difference to me which app folks land on. Everyone should use what works for them and I still encourage everyone to get and try all three. Dorico, Sibelius and MuseScore. They both have demos and of course MuseScore is still free.

My experience with Sibelius is similar to yours with Dorico. It's almost as if these things were entirely subjective. ;-)

The Quick Reference Guide is 2 page long:
https://blog.dorico.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Dorico-Quick-Reference-Card.pdf

Finale's "Quick Reference Card" PDF is 4 pages.  What's your point?

Popovers are the main entry method for a host of notation. It's completely understandable that the list would be long -- but a 5 second glance at it shows you that most of the terms are extremely obvious or easily memorable, like F for F major, treble for treble clef.

There's plenty of criticism of Dorico on the forum, and Daniel Spreadbury is entirely candid about what's currently possible, apologetic about what the limitations and problems are; and open about what's planned for the future. I myself have pointed out things I don't like; and things that I would like addressed. You might like to consider that it's not what you say, but the way you say it....

Ernie, I’m in the middle of my second score using Dorico, having ditched Finale (MM ditched us users, so I have zero loyalty to a dead program when the company didn’t even care to remove the authorization requirement; screw MakeMusic; they don’t deserve us long-time users).

Yes, it’s been a challenge. I’ve posted many times to the forum, and generally get my answers there. The help pages are not helpful to me in general; they are good at defining things but not good at telling folks how to actually do those things. So there’s that.

Yes, it is convoluted, and I’ve certainly expressed my observations (politely) on the forum. Dorico is extremely configurable; much more so than Finale. But with all that configurability comes complexity. There are several “libraries” that are basically preference folders that do not always make it obvious to me where various options reside. And yes, there is a sense of “just do it the way Dorico wants you to do it” that goes against my grain. But in the spirit of trying to master the program, I’ve approached it mostly the “Dorico way.” And to be honest, it does work pretty well that way. I do have Pitch Before Duration set up by default, which makes it less likely for me to inadvertently input notes (which happens all the time when I have Duration before Pitch in force, which is the normal default and existed from the start in Dorico). I also remapped the note durations to n-1, which is how it is in Finale. After 32-33 years of Finale, I’m just not going to change, and it doesn’t really matter to Dorico whether I want 5 to be a quarter note (Finale) or an eighth note (Dorico). BFD.

Some things are way superior to Finale. It’s easy for me to repeat notes and entire measures by just hitting R. Changing voices is even easier than in Finale. I don’t really have to mess with rests since the program figures it out for me. Most of the engraving options are done automatically. There was still some setup I had to do with this current score to get the layout the way I want it (some staves were overlapping after I entered notes, but after a bunch of trial and error and help from the forum, it’s been fine since then). Most things just work, period. And being able to select a run of notes, hit option-right arrow, and move all of them several steps to the right without having to input rests is very helpful.

Now for some annoyances; while there are some advantages to treating tied notes as a single unit, it’s a major pain in the ass for me every time I have to untie notes to do something (change duration, select, copy) with a note that is part of a tie. In Finale, it didn’t matter; I could select a portion of a note and copy it by dragging. That’s not how Dorico treats things, and while there are some advantages, I’m not sure I’m seeing it as a huge advantage. The undo/redo history includes every time one selects a note, so it becomes a bit longer to undo things by hitting cmd-z (or ctl-z on a PC). There is no “play from leftmost measure” so I have to select a note and hit P to get things to play from a specific point. And if I accidentally hit more than one note on that staff, it only plays back that staff. Useful, when one wants to just hear that staff, but too easy for me to accidentally include >1 note. Enharmonic spellings are not always consistent, even in adjacent measures, so I often have to fix those on the fly, That happened in Finale as well, but it seemed easier to deal with my just hitting 9 in Speedy Entry or selecting a region and hitting Prefer Sharps, etc.

And yes, lots of keyboard shortcuts to remember; probably more than in Finale. The popovers are useful, but I only use a few of them and keep forgetting that shift-I is the Note Options tool. Since the popovers area on the right side of the screen doesn’t have tool tips that show the keyboard shortcuts (which is odd, because other elements on the screen do have shortcuts included in tool tips), that lengthy reference is very helpful and necessary. Some things are indeed memorable, but others…not so much. I also really wish it had a JW Rhythm Copy plugin; there is a way to get something similar in Dorico with locking a measure and copying it, but you then have to change the pitches, whereas the JW plugin eliminates a few steps.

I think Finale is more Mac-like in that it is more mouse- or trackpad-centric while Dorico is very much keyboard-driven. I’m a trackpad person, much as I like keyboard shortcuts when kept to a reasonable level.

But Dorico is working out for me. Finale had too many bugs and quirks, and while I could get a lot done, especially given all the plugins, by the time I was done I had so many plugins it got laborious to remember where everything was, especially with a ton of .lua scripts that also provided necessary functionality. I use one script in Dorico, to create artificial harmonics at the standard fourth partial (the Dorico way produces the octave partial, which is not something I’ve ever seen for strings nor are they even possible, and it is a little more effort to change them to the standard fourth partial).

In other words, I don’t disagree with much of what you’ve stated here. Lots of good things in Dorico, and some things I wish were a bit different, but I assume they did these things for a reason. Had MM done Finale justice by doing a better job of maintaining and innovating the software, being responsive to their users (Dorico’s team is pretty phenomenal in that area) and not alienating its long time users while failing to grow its user base, I’d still be using Finale. That was my plan. But life doesn’t always work out the way one thinks it should. If that were true, we’d have a very different administration coming in next January.

One clue to understanding the Dorico help system (which you may already have discovered, David) is that searching for a noun ("notes," "tempo") gives one general information, while searching for a verb ending in ing (I guess one would call that a present participle) generally leads one to an explanation of how to do something ("entering," "changing," "removing").

Like Ben, I started shifting from Finale to Dorico from its inception (even earlier, following articles about the program's development on Daniel Spreadbury's blog), so I also had the opportunity to learn the program without the pressure today's Finale alumni face.

(I had learned how confusing one's initial steps learning a new notation could be from transitioning to Finale in the late 1980's.)

Thanks. I actually had not been aware of that distinction for searching the help pages and will try that next time. Much appreciated.

Finale's "Quick Reference Card" PDF is 4 pages.  What's your point?

The point was "quick" not especially only referring to Dorico. Whether it is 3 ri 4 pages it hardly infers "quick".

I've successfully entered two score in both Dorico and Sibelius. One big band and one concert band.The Dorico took several days to get to where I was not constantly hunting and scratching my head how do you do this or that. The SIbelius took maybe two hours to get to the comfortable point.

Look simple stuff, any average music person should be able to get the simple score in any of them. I bought both Dorico and Sibelius Ultimate so I have them. Perhaps if Dorico wakes up and streamlines all the ambiguousness and unintuitive things, I may go wit it. One big problem with Dorico is it wants you to forget the mouse and use either the computer keyboard or better a midi keyboard so it is geared that way. People have spent a lifetime with the mouse and going away from keyboards so this is foreign and backwards to me and I suspect to most of us. For example drag and drop, every app has that but not Dorico.

Dorico has the uncanny way of making the simplest of tasks difficult or impossible.  Bottom line today 11/27/2024 there is no reason to make the switch and certainly not until Spreadbury gets the program where it should be. I can wait because my Finale is running perfectly and I have Sibelius where I still feel almost at home.

Why did you even start this "discussion" into the choices that other people might make? Plenty of people have found good reasons to make the switch, so your "bottom line" that "there is no reason" just isn't true. And calling people just by their surname is needlessly curt, to say the least. 

The internet already knows that you didn't get on with it. No program suits everyone. But plenty of people find it enjoyable. There are loads of testimonies on the Dorico forum from people who have made the switch from Finale, happily, not reluctantly. I'm certainly much more productive than I ever was with Finale. 

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/my-impression-of-dorico-after-a-month-from-an-ex-finale-user/937621

I'm going to try very hard not to reply to any more of the countless posts that you will no doubt spend your time making, here or elsewhere, about the software that you don't want to use; because it's just boring and there's no new information. 

As mentioned, it is indeed keyboard-centric and I'm a trackpad person, but as with most professional software, there are many ways to accomplish the same thing. So I can right-click and filter several selected notes or chords based on different criteria. It's easy to use a popover to add notes to form a chord, and on multiple notes at once. I've managed to use the trackpad for many things, while learning a few of the more common keyboard commands I typically would use. That's not at all different from Finale's paradigm; I used to have a bunch of different metatools programmed, and also knew the common keyboard commands in Speedy Entry like 9 for enharmonic changes, ; for a grace note, shift-I for insertion mode, etc. Other than having a bunch more keyboard commands at one's disposal (which one doesn't have to use for most things as many of them are accessible by contextual menus or in the menu bar or shelf), it's really NBD. 

For me, a major attraction of Dorico is that it is far and away less buggy and more predictable than Finale. Every time I used Finale in the past few years, there were always surprises, especially regarding playback. Glitches abounded. Some things were fixed by MM, and in the past year, nothing was fixed of course. In Dorico, if I select a note in one section of music, it displays the correct tempo marking in the playback window, so I don't have to go scrolling through my score to remember what the current metronome marking is. Can't do that in Finale. I also can't audition different speeds ever since Use Current Settings or Reset (which amount to the same thing, in practice) broke in the playback controls and was never fixed. 

Doesn't matter to me what anyone else uses, and I had my own reasons for sticking with Finale until it was end-of-lifed. But it was a convoluted mess over the past few years and I'm actually happy that I had a rescue boat named Dorico to jump into. There will always be things I'd love to be different about any program; lots of things in MS Word and Excel I'd love to see adjusted, and the same is true of many things in iOS. But Dorico is working for me, and in many ways is working better and more reliably than Finale. 

I'm going to try very hard not to reply to any more of the countless posts  ...

Oh, break my heart.

Nobody, not me, asked for your opinion but I suspect yours is the only one that counts? Right?

Look I know everyone has their favs. My goal was to, at least in my mind, show that Finale is the superior product. MM has made a mistake. A big mistake I wish and hope they would or could see this and reinstate Finale. I suppose by now there is a  save face issue so not it's not likely to happen. Trust in the music community is probably shot. I doubt and don't think they knew what they had and how much it was used in the music world.  Even with the little to few upgrades, itis the best.

Sibelius is close but it is in second place.

Hey Biggs: I'm not going to indulge you further after this, but no, Finale is no longer "the best." It probably hasn't been "the best" in several years. And no, this train has sailed. MM is not going to suddenly take it all back, hire more developers and tech support staff, and somehow figure out how to rewrite all or most of the antiquated spaghetti code and fix most of the bugs and manage to innovate and come up with new features. That's magical thinking at its worst. They lost me, a user of 33 or so years. Finale has been buggy as hell, except in your hands apparently.

The best MM might do, and this is total speculation on my part, is to issue a version that doesn't rely on an authorization server, so that folks like you who prefer to use Finale forever can do so, barring OS limitations (which really are not that likely to totally hose Finale or any other app, including macOS, anytime soon). 

You do you. But stop rudely lecturing people. It's annoying AF. 

Here is your official invitation to stop reading my posts. Personalized just for you now you can sleep peacefully at night. And I can too knowing you won't responding your useless thoughts. You might take a look in the mirror about that rude thing.

Oh guys, it's really sad to see ones with such sensitive skin and negative thoughts. Although politeness is not everyone's skill, or maybe your parents didn't teach you it in the first place, stay focused. Why don't you just try to put feelings aside and benefit from each other's experiences and skills? I'm also having trouble accepting Finale's finale. The question on my mind is where to go next with notation. In the early eighties I started with Dr. T and Atari, then I switched to Logic, then Sibelius and finally Finale, which was also part of my studies at Berklee. So far so good, but now my composing and orchestration commissions, family life, etc. keep me so busy that I don't know where I'll find the time and energy to develop my notation skills to the same level with the new software that I've reached with Finale. Above all, what would be the right choice? Learning will be hard and I know it will take several years to make the work smooth and profitable. My compositions and arrangements are both traditional and modern orchestral scores and parts. With the help of Finale I have managed to earn a living, but now I am a bit lost. I do value all opinion since Finale is dead even though I'm still using it. I have to make my mind but I hope it is the right one.  

Greetings. BTW, just back from our son’s graduation at Berklee. His first time on campus since he was an online student. Great school. I lived in Boston during my ob/gyn residency at the Brigham and MGH, and miss the city a lot.

Anyway, having a ton of commissions is a good problem to have. I have to work hard to get my music performed so kudos to you.

As far as where to go from Finale: there are three main choices (Dorico, Miusescore, Sibelius). I chose Dorico and am glad I did. The transition was not that difficult. It did take some work but far less time was involved than when I first learned Finale. And I was working full time while learning Dorico. So if I could manage to do it (I just posted my sixth work done in Dorico since I switched in late August/early Sept), anyone can. But pocketing and move forward. Happy to offer any guidance if desired.

Until MuseScore 5 comes out, there is no final choice, IMO. It will be interesting to see if it brings anything to the table. They are certainly talking a good game but a) Will all that AI really make a difference? b) Will it really become the only acceptable notation app for the world's largest music publisher, now owned by Muse Group?

They spent a lot of time blowing smoke in my direction at NAMM but, since no one was offering me a job, I didn't take it all that seriously. At least one of the things I was told was not true.

We'll see... I've had Dorico since v.2, don't care at all about Sibelius and still like Finale. I need to work on a revision of my big Christmas book by July so am contemplating continuing in Finale or rolling up my sleeves and getting into Dorico.