Hmmm...

No third option, eh?

Bummer; I was hoping to dwell on at least one other option.

;-)
Vanessa

Hi David, I have no experience of virtual machines, but I gather some people find their performance can be quite a bit slower than the host computer. Do you happen to know if this is the case?

Also, I appreciated your other comment about having to accept things "the "Dorico way", which is perhaps only to be expected from a program created by former Sibelius designers: it was precisely that rigidity of approach which was why I chose Finale over Sibelius back in 1997, when I first dipped a toe into computer notation after many years of pencil and score paper.

@Vanessa: hi! There are other options, like a virtual machine running your current OS. That should be reasonably future-proofed.

@kevin: I have not used a VM in years; I think I used it in the early 2000's to run MS Access but it was (at that time) slow but usable. I've not heard speed as a concern with more recent machines, but that is certainly something to ask about. Parallels has a trial, so easy to check it out for free and see how it performs. 

Yeah, I'm finding the Dorico Way to rub against my grain, but I'm going to suck it up this holiday weekend and try it out in more detail. One example: I had converted the F27 file I'm currently working on for a new piece I'm writing and imported into Dorico. Many measures were interrupted. The playback was fine but the layout was all wrong. I posted it on the Dorico forum and got corrected by two people (one of whom is their ubiquitous manager) that the issue was with my score; I use a single time signature at the beginning as a large time signature so it is only displayed formally on one staff while hidden in the others, which is easy to do with Finale. Apparently when imported into Dorico via MXML 4.0, Dorico goes nuts because I have not formally told it that each staff is in 4/4. If you import it into Finale via MusicXML, it is all good. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around a lot of things with Dorico that I don't necessarily worry about with Finale. Plus they are very into "flows," which I think is their term for sections or movements, and all my works are continuous in one "flow" I guess. Just different terminology. 

At least there is a way to enter notes starting with pitch then duration as with Speedy Entry (or the reverse, as if one has Caps Lock on with a MIDI keyboard, but it's not as speedy for me yet as Speedy Entry). They also use 6 for a quarter note rather than 5; I was told I can indeed change that but I should consider just embracing the program's way of doing things, and I can tell you, that 6 is going to be changed to 5 in the preferences first thing. I have my limits...

The point of the VM is not to use as a general productivity instance, it's to facilitate opening software the current OS revision does not support so you can do things like... export a MusicXML of a Finale file at that time, or print out a PDF.

But I think on current machines VMs perform fine.  NVMe Drives, 8-16C CPUs, Gobs of Fast RAM, etc.

-----

Dorico has some weird defaults for MusicXML Import (IMO).  The first thing anyone should do after installing Dorico is go to Preferences and make sure everything is set up the way they need it to be.  Do this before importing any MusicXML files.  You may otherwise end up doing extra work that you could have avoided with simple check boxes.

I would think one could use Finale 27 much the same as he/she does now, just locked to that VM.

David and Nathaniel: many thanks to you both for taking the time to reply and for your helpful advice.

Good luck David with your deep dive into the mysteries and quirks of Dorico; it all serves to make me extremely reluctant to attempt to learn a new program at this stage in my life, but I guess that somewhere down the road, I may have to ...

Yes, because Finale is a low resource application.  It requires very little storage (with NotePerformer, for example) and it's not that Compute-Intensive.  But for heavier applications VMs can be problematic depending on your spec package.

Using a VM basically means Finale becomes an app with a 4GB base RAM footprint (macOS and Windows 11 both use about 3.5GB RAM on a fresh boot with minimal third-party services), and the CPU utilization is drastically increased... so it depends on how you use that machine.

That's only really a requirement once a macOS update/upgrade breaks the app, though.  This should not be required on Windows for the foreseeable future (and Compatibility Mode often works), and computers these days are fairly reliable for 7-10 years of operation.

I have had somewhat regular use of virtual machines (albeit not yet using Finale in one, though that will probably soon be changing) and really don't expect performance to be an issue on any comparatively recent hardware.

However, an aspect in which there could be potential quirks or issues lies in how the virtual machine might need to interface with the physical machine's hardware, such as MIDI devices or audio (microphone / speaker) devices.  Some virtual machine platforms support some physical interfaces better than others.

If you don't need MIDI devices, and if high-fidelity microphone recording and speaker playback is not a concern to you either, then you can ignore the rest here.  Finale should work fine for you in a virtual machine.

If some of those things are important to you—

From a security standpoint, isolating a virtual machine from the physical machine is beneficial because it reduces the potential attack surface, and in enterprise scenarios that don't need to interface with special hardware, such isolation is typically a non-issue (and even desirable).

For users running special software that might expect to interface with such hardware, though, such isolation potentially adds some extra steps that might be needed to allow the virtual machine to access the specific physical machine capabilities—if the particular virtual machine platform allows it.

On Windows, Microsoft Hyper-V tends to fall more under a stricter isolation category, though performance is good and the product is well supported.  VirtualBox, on the other hand, has provided a few mechanisms that make it easier, for example, to bridge USB devices from the physical machine to the virtual machine.  So, if needing both hardware support and ease of use in (virtually) hooking up that hardware, something like VirtualBox might be a better fit for you.

Also note that regardless of which virtual machine solution you might you, it might be necessary to go into your computer's BIOS settings and enable virtualization.  (Some PC makers have shipped computers with that disabled by default.)

Thanks Nathaniel for your helpful suggestions: the only drawback for me might be that for larger orchestral scores, I have Vienna Ensemble Pro Server set up to provide playback (although the actual samples are accessed from external SSD drives); I'm not sure how much of a RAM footprint this requires, so I wonder if slower speed might become an issue for me.

As you point out, this won't become necessary until a future Mac OS will no longer run Finale; so bide our time ...

Hmmm...
No third option, eh?
Bummer; I was hoping to dwell on at least one other option.
;-)

Well… you can ignore it as I intend to do. I have three licenses eligible for crossgrade and did that with one in 2018. Only if my wife wants Dorico will I consider purchasing another license—if it takes so long that I have to pay $299, that’s life. As her in-house tech support, I hope that we can keep Finale running on her Mac forever. I expect that MuseScore 5 will be released by then and she may prefer that. I do Not want to teach her MuseScore 4…No, no, no!