Brock,

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Having said that, the slowness and other problems you mention are not new. Many of us, myself included, have reverted to using F25 or 26, until 27 is ready for prime time.

Thanks for the acknowledgement.  If the team are aware, I'm good with that.  Guess I just wanted to vent.

I'm finding 27 on the Mac over Monterey to be pretty good. Many of the issues I experienced in 25 and 26 have been cleared up. 

Everyone’s mileage will vary, and if someone reports problems I think that should be considered credible. In my own usage, on a Mac, F27.1 has performed about the same as F26. Which means good and bad. For sure it works for me. But as with probably every version of Finale since 2012 (2012 somehow seemed to be one of the more reliable builds for some reason, and I’m still nostalgic about v 3.5 that was pretty elegant for its time), there are issues. Crashes on occasion, reproducible crashes with some JW plugins (not MM’s fault or responsibility, but given how indispensable these plugins are for many of us, troubling just the same), SMuFL font oddities (tech support can’t reproduce them but damn if I can’t reproduce them consistently), issues with older files, etc. 

All applications have bugs. But I think what is troubling is that despite having been supposedly rebuilt for 64-bit capability (and maybe I’m misremembering and Finale wasn’t largely rebuilt for that), there remain so many issues. And so many missed opportunities. 

I’m going off the reservation a bit and for that I’ll blame the really nice Amarone I had with dinner, but when I see how much enthusiasm Dorico 4 just got vs how little enthusiasm (understandably) Finale 27 received, it’s pretty stunning. I think at least some of their users are almost cult-like, but that doesn’t minimize the fact that they are actually innovating (their nice Insert feature is something that would have been so useful for me in Finale had it existed), Some of their features are not relevant to me, but many are. Just the way it deals with cautionary accidentals would have saved me a lot of time over the years. 

Yes, Finale is such that I generally don’t have to worry as to whether or not I can make it happen. But so much of the UI is horribly dated, and the workflow totally antiquated. I get so much more out of various plugins, free and commercial, while Finale itself seems to be stuck for the most part with half-efforts. Why doesn’t Finale have a piano roll? I read a ton of derision from former Finale users about how there is still a Redraw Screen command in Finale, but while that’s a bit much, I do think they have a point. 

So if some folks here are not yet even using F27 because of stability issues, that’s very telling. And it doesn’t bode well for the future of Finale. I’m not interested in switching notation applications for the new, cool thing being hyped nonstop. I’m really not. There’s much to like about Finale. But honestly, MM needs to pull out some really intriguing features. Hell, it should at the very least look into gaining parity with Dorico in some ways. I couldn’t use Dorico personally; it doesn’t fit the way I compose and I don’t want to be forced to have to conform to a rigid way of doing things. But if this were 30 years ago and I were starting out on my first notation program, I’m hard-pressed to find a compelling reason to go with Finale over Dorico. The younger me would have absolutely not made the same choice I did in the early 90’s and that’s a shame. 

If Finale’s user base ends up consisting of old farts like me who are not really in a position to change software packages because of the time and effort involved in transitioning to another complex program, it’s not going to survive. Sorry to be so blunt, but from a business perspective, this is not a good situation. Sibelius is not a lot better from what I read, but I have never used Sibelius so I don’t care about their future. I do care about Finale. I even wrote a business school paper about version 3.5.2 back in the day, because it was an example of a truly elegant application and I still stand by those words. I wish I could say the same for most versions of Finale since the days of Coda Software but I just can’t. 

I get the impression that Finale built this for the Mac and then hacked it into Windows.  They couldn't find the functions they used in MacOS in WIndows so they used rough approximations.  And the testing was clearly inadequate.  

Here's another one.  When I open a tempo alteration window, it puts a HUGE font in the window where you select a note and enter a value.  You can't even see the entire note in the window.  It's not damaging, but it's just stupid and embarassing.  I think I will log these into the Finale bug db.

(FWIW I am a former IT exec.  Our mission was to implement internal software for internal business.  We got it before the market did.  So part of my career was running a multi-billion $ business on what amounted to Beta code.  I am ABUNDANTLY aware of what sloppy, undertested code looks like.)