All Things Must Pass
Including software!
I was thinking of George Harrison’s iconic song this week after reading the bombshell news that the music notation app Finale was… finished. As in, Finito. Kaput. Extinct. This software has been around on Macs and PC for 35 years, so to say the news was shocking is an understatement… although, for years, the signs had been there for all to see if you knew what to look for.
I’ve been the Tech Daddy since the late 80s; however, I have been in music preparation, orchestration and more since the late 60s! My goal with today’s column is to not dwell on the minutiae of what is best described as “niche software” but instead on the broader implications of what happens when software you use and depend on almost every day suddenly disappears, and how to deal with it if that happens. Because the longer you use tech, the more likely this will happen to you. To make this point, I will be veering into some music software-specifics, so please bear with me, as I promise it’ll pay off by the end. So grab a snorkel, and let’s dive in!
Let The Music Play
To the best of my knowledge, in 1987, I was the first professional music “copyist” (as we were called for centuries; now, we prefer the term ‘music preparation’) in the Los Angeles studios to use a computer to generate music parts and scores. I started on a good ol’ Mac Plus. The software I started with was “Professional Composer,” from a very odd Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company called MOTU: Mark Of The Unicorn. Well, come to think of it, most Mac users in those days were odd. ;-)
The following year, a much more ambitious and complex notation app for the Mac was introduced: Finale; two years after that, the Windows version was released. The software came with documentation in a three-inch binder. I will never forget how Bible quotes were scattered throughout it, with pull quotes like “Do you need help? Try the Lord!” Um… OK, then! I tried using Finale and realized I could never complete music assignments in time, as studio copyists were — and still are — on extremely tight deadlines. This gave rise to my oft-repeated statement: “The words ‘Finale’ and ‘deadline’ cannot occur in the same sentence.” Having re-visited the software at various times over several decades, I found that phrase still applied. However, several years after its introduction, Finale became the de facto standard used by most churches, schools, classical composers, and symphony orchestra librarians worldwide.
Finale, like almost all music notation apps, came from the world of academia, not the world of professional musicians like me. Although we have the most to gain or lose from the software we use — we have the most money on the line if we can’t deliver — we make up a tiny fraction of the “user base.” To make money selling music notation software, you have to cast a very wide net that includes musicians from religious and educational institutions, hobbyists, classical, jazz and Broadway composers, and more. And all these users have their own unique needs that must be met. I am still awed by the fact that these apps even exist!
C Suite Shenanigans
While software from Microsoft and Adobe are considered “evergreen,” meaning new customers will usually appear as the years pass, almost all other software companies have to hustle to find new customers so they can continue development. Where things get dicey is when a larger software company goes public. When that happens, the users take a back seat to the stockholders, a turn of events that rarely works well for a product’s longevity. And this is ultimately what sealed Finale’s fate.
Like a lot of software, Finale started as the brainchild of one person: Phil Farrand. As it grew, more people joined Coda Music Software until it became an irresistible fruit ripe for the picking by other companies. Coda was eventually sold to a German record company (!) Net4Music, which later became MakeMusic. During MakeMusic’s tenure, almost everyone involved in the creation and development of Finale was sacked in favor of “cheaper” labor, again something not unusual in venerable software. However, when that happens, the software's “soul” can often disappear, as those who are left rarely have any personal investment or passion for its future. It’s “just another job” for the programming team.
In 2013, MakeMusic made a deal with Alfred, a gigantic and well-known music publisher, to distribute its products, and then MakeMusic itself — now ripe for the picking — was acquired by Peaksware, a Colorado-based company known for software aimed at people in high-level sports and athletics. What?! When that happened, I said to myself, “Finale is not long for this world,” and sadly, I was right. I say “sadly” because — although I have never cared for the app — hundreds of thousands of other people did. While there are other music notation apps that I think are superior to Finale (For 20 years, I have used and recommended Sibelius, and now there is the new-ish upstart, Dorico, which raises the bar), I think its actual “cause of death” was corporate greed and mismanagement, including the unwillingness to invest in bringing Finale on par with its competition.
How Do You Keep The Music Playing?
In my music career, I migrated from one notation app to another no less than five times: I went from Professional Composer to Composer’s Mosaic to Graphic Notes (so obscure it’s been lost to history), to (briefly) Encore to finally Sibelius. And while I still love Sibelius — while trying my best to learn Dorico — the same thing almost happened with AVID, Sibelius’ parent company. Years ago, they, too, sacked their entire programming staff to save money; the staff would soon be picked up en masse by Steinberg to create what is now Dorico. That’s right: both Sibelius as we know it today and Dorico can be traced to one amazingly talented and visionary person: Daniel Spreadbury! Fortunately, Dorico’s corporate owner is Steinberg, which in turn is owned by Yamaha. Both companies are famous for taking “the long view” and not catering to the whims of stockholders. Talk about a breath of fresh air!
A couple of years ago, AVID was still teetering on the edge of insolvency when it did something remarkable: it withdrew from being a publicly traded company and went private. Ever since, product updates and innovation have been coming at ever-increasing rates, and I couldn’t be happier for them.
So, how does this admittedly obscure tale relate to anyone not involved in music production? This situation keeps playing out repeatedly in the tech world: small but plucky software companies gobbled up by large, soulless corporate entities, many times resulting in the app’s demise a few years later. Another, more poignant cause of Software Death involves shareware, the backbone of Apple-based software since the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Shareware companies typically have one- or two-person operations and usually stay that way. The apps are passion projects by people with “a better idea” and can be more agile and inventive than software from mega-corporations.
The downside is that a shareware-based app usually lasts only as long as its developer does. If that person suffers a debilitating illness, loses interest, or (in the worst case) dies, so does their software, unless they were able to sell it to another developer first. I can think of a few potent examples, such as the late, great art text and logo designing app “TypeStyler”; a database I used for recipes called “QuickDex” that then became “iData”; the once-ubiquitous automation app “QuicKeys,” and even Apple’s legendary “HyperCard.” All swept into the Dustbin of History.
When this happens, it can become a source of anger, frustration and worse. (The Seven Stages Of Grief come to mind.) In Finale’s case, a justifiable source of anger is how much time the average user spent learning how to use the app in the first place! For some people, it took them years to master the software! The problem here is that people often are at the effect of that anger and frustration, which prevents them from moving on. Instead, they stubbornly cling to the past, refusing to move to another app (in this case, Sibelius or Dorico) because they don’t want to start all over again at Square One. They don’t want to once again be a “noob.” Trust me, after doing this several times over the years, I get it!
Playing The Standards
At times like these, it’s essential to take a step back and try to remove the emotion of the situation instead of being more analytical. “OK, this is what has happened, and now I have to deal with it. I had a lot of skill with that other app, which will make it easier for me to pick up on whatever this new app offers.” And there is almost always a new app you can use to do what you were doing with the old one — quite often with more powerful and innovative features. Will it cost some of your time and money? Yes. And, if it was important enough to you in the first place, the time and money will be worth it.
The first step to take is to make sure that you have exports of all your files in “standard” formats, meaning formats that have been around as long as computers have and will continue for many years to come. I’m talking about PDFs, PNGs and JPEGs, etc. In the case of a music notation app like Finale, that means — if you haven’t done so already — saving every file you’ve ever created in both PDF and MusicXML formats. (Finale 27, the last version, saves as MusicXML 4, the latest iteration of this standard.)
For apps like the old QuicKeys that didn’t support any standards, there is no way to export and import your data into another app, such as the one I now use: Keyboard Maestro. In that case, take screenshots of all your settings or preferences or whatever else you might have to re-create in another app. I also keep screenshots of settings within apps I use, like Bartender and MacUpdater, so I can easily re-create them when I migrate to a new computer and decide to start from scratch. (Happily, Bartender just included a new Export/Import feature, which I’d like to see in ALL apps that deal with settings!)
That’s A Wrap!
As I said at the top, the longer you use a computer, the more likely you’ll have to endure the loss of a favorite app or service. So be prepared by using the export, backup and screenshot methods I just outlined and — if the worst should happen — don’t let anger and grief keep you from moving on to the Next Big Thing. That’s the promise of tech: there’s always something groundbreaking just over the horizon!
Your friendly neighborhood Tech Daddy
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Leigh Adams Edgar Johnson