Finale 27 not starting up with 454 plug-ins

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DANIEL SOVAK Posted May 21, 2025 18:03

With Finale 27 on Mac OS 14.7.6, I sent this message to tech support:

<<I have had nothing but Finale grief lately. After installing NotePerformer 5.0.1, I was not able to open Finale. I reinstalled Finale and NotePerformer, and I removed about 450 plug-ins from the Components folder except for NotePerformer and Aria Player, and then I was able to open Finale. However, I wanted to keep all of my 454 plug ins for usage in other programs, so to test, I moved 50 plug-ins back to the Components folder, and Finale again would not start. I don't want to reinstall 450 other plug-ins. Please advise and let me know how I could get to a point where I can have Finale start up easily with ALL 454 of my plug-ins.>>

Andrew G. from Finale tech support replied:

<<What we generally recommend is adding plug-ins back into the folder in larger chunks until Finale won't launch>>

I tried this with 50 plug-ins with no luck. This will take me forever. Are there any preference files or files related to the plug-ins that I can delete? Thanks in advance.

Dan

2 comments

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MIKE HALLORAN Edited May 27, 2025 19:12

None of that really works. I own over 700 plugins and have posted many times on this over the years. Here's how to do it:

Launch Finale. When it crashes, try again—if it won't, reboot and try again—and again if you must. If Finale or the Mac crashes, reboot and try again. Whatever happens, DO NOT UNINSTALL FINALE OR NOTEPERFORMER or you have to start from scratch.

When Finale finally launches, you are good and will not see this again—until the next NotePerformer update when you get to do it all over again.

Arne Wallander and I discovered this with NP3 and Finale 26 nearly seven ago and both of us sent it with our notes and reports into MakeMusic. The problem is that, with every NP installation or update, Finale for Mac reexamines every AU. MakeMusic never fixed this and never will.

My 18 core iMac Pro with 128GB RAM crashed 4–6 times on average doing this. My 24 core M2 Studio Ultra with 192GB unified RAM doesn't crash but Finale will one or two times—as it did when I installed NP 5.0 a few weeks ago.

Now you know.

DANIEL SOVAK Posted May 31, 2025 04:35

Mike, thanks for your comments about my situation. I read your thoughtful posts on this topic, which were helpful. I finally solved my issue of Finale not starting up in 2 ways:

1. When I looked at the crash report, "Softube Daemon" was listed repeatedly, so I reinstalled the latest updates of my 3 Softube plug-ins (Dirty Tape, Saturation Knob, and VCA Compressor).

2. When I saw that Finale was still not responsive, I went to the "Force Quit Applications" window on Mac. When I saw "Finale (not responding)", I assumed that Finale had crashed from trying to whitelist my 454 plug-ins, and I gave up. I did not notice that the Finale icon in the dock was still bouncing up and down. On a subsequent try to open Finale, I gave it more time after getting the "Finale (not responding)" notification. After a few minutes of the Finale icon bouncing up and down in the dock, Finale finally opened. So it appears to me that the Finale icon bouncing in the dock indicates that Finale is just taking a very long time to whitelist all plug-ins. So if this happens the next time, I will just give it more time to whitelist all plug-ins.

Dan Sovak

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