David, you’re preaching to the choir. We’ve been asking for this, well, forever.

I use Finale for almost 30 years but I am getting afraid of it becoming abandonware. Started learning and using Dorico 3.5 a few months ago and they are almost there ultrapassing many areas that Finale was king - magnetic positions of various elements (Finale until today doesn't have it), midi and playback refinements, many customisations, etc. Despite many long problems Finale is a good notation program but if it continues to make only cosmetic upgrades I am afraid that others (Dorico, Musescore, Staffpad) eventually will surpass it. It is a pity. I hope they (the developers of Finale) don't let this happen.

OT: I tried to edit my profile to show my configuration but couldn't find where to do it. If anyone can help with it, I appreciate the help.

Finale 26 on Mac using Mac OS Mojave 10.14.6

Yeah, I know I know. Been asking for this forever myself! 

Perhaps, since Finale says they are reworking the underlying code, some of this can be and is being done. We can cross our fingers and see what comes out.

Sorry to continue this rant, but that last time I talked to them about ongoing bugs and problems for ten years, they replied "we know about that problem". What really makes me mad is that they insist on taking our money for each 'upgrade' otherwise even the slim and almost non-existent support they offer is withdrawn. So, I pays my money, and behold! The same problems are there again in the new version. If they know of the problems and changes that need to be made, why don't they just do them??? I started out when you could call and ask about anything! Those days are history. More money, no support. It's no surprise that they have lost so many customers to Sibelius, Dorico, etc etc.

Totally agree with all of this above. It’s insane that Finale has not really kept pace with its competitors. The fact that the MIDI tool is no different than it was many years ago and remains underpowered and clunky says it all. And the interface remains suboptimal; why can’t us Mac users remove unneeded tools (eg, simple entry, which I’ve never used in decades and never ever will) from the Toolbar? Why is setting up a new score so painful? Why is it that the JW plugins allow me to do many things that Finale should have incorporated? Why is playback always problematic for every score I create (seriously; the last composition I wrote was a string quartet and it took many hours to fix all the playback errors in terms of dynamic glitches, poor balance, etc)? I shouldn’t have to purchase something like Noteperformer (which I likely will have to do, moving forward, since Finale’s playback is usually terrible) to make all this work. I’m not a composer by profession; like many others, I have a day job and every hour I waste on Finale’s nonsense is time lost on actually composing. 

Like many of you, I’ve been using Finale, and only Finale, for notation for decades (I started with v. 3.2.1 for PowerPC in the early 90’s) and have remained loyal. I even wrote a paper in a graduate business class about how Finale 3.5 was an elegant software program. I had been a committed beta tester (until v27, since for reasons I do not understand, I was never contacted to do another round of beta testing after v26, but no big deal since v27 seems to not have features mentioned thus far that would compel me to upgrade). But I’m getting really tired of Finale moving at a snail’s pace and falling behind other software programs. If i felt I had the time and $ to make a switch, I probably would. But there are many things I do like about Finale, quirks and all (and honestly, Jari’s plugins make it better than it would be otherwise; I can’t imagine having to use Finale without some of the JW plugins). I know this is not the best way to contact support and light a fire under their butts, but since there is not as much communication with the developers as there had been many years ago on the forums (ie, it’s largely nonexistent), this is the only way I can really try it. I’ve communicated with tech support over the years and it was almost always very helpful and service-oriented. Lately, not so much. 

David -

I would like to understand better what you mean by "no way to globally change staff names without changing them individually". What sort of change do you imagine? Font change, name change?

Both, actually. Thanks.

As far as the (full and abbreviated) staff name font sizes are concerned, I wrote a simple JWLua solution some years ago: Re: Different size Full / Abbrev. Staff Names?

Indeed, Finale has no built-in way of changing multiple staff names easily at once. It would be nice to have such a feature. In the meanwhile, using JWLua can help to add such a function.

Having read a bit about it, I can’t imagine using the words “simple” and “JWLua” in the same sentence. I am in awe of you folk who can write those scripts!

Yes, please.  Some of the same bugs have been in every upgrade since 2005, and they keep getting worse.  I appreciate the new features a lot, but not at the expense of the things that are supposed to work but don't.