Now marketed by MakeMusic! (with exclamation mark), Finale was last reviewed in SOS in its 2003 livery back in January 2003.

It's easy to think of Sibelius (version 3 of which was reviewed in July 2004's SOS) as a newcomer, and it's now nearly 10 years old! Perhaps Sibelius 's closest competition is the subject of this review, however: the latest version of software that was launched by Coda Music as a Macintosh-only package in the late '80s, Finale 2004. Leland C Smith's SCORE, for example, is still in development and started life in 1967.

There have been a surprising number of scoring packages over the years, and what's even more surprising is that many of them have actually lasted for years. They'd rather see software development and processing power channelled to aiding their goal of getting the notes and allied graphic elements into a score in as fast and intuitive a way as possible, arranging the layout on the page, and outputting a readable or publishable result, whether direct to paper or to some form of exportable graphic file. But this aspect of MIDI sequencers isn't nearly fully enough developed for composers, arrangers, engravers and educators who simply don't need the audio processing and data manipulation typically offered by such programs. Notation programs often seem superficially similar to standard MIDI sequencers, and many sequencers offer note input via score editors and various layout and printout options. If this is true of MIDI sequencing software, it becomes even more so when we move into the relatively rarified atmosphere of scoring/notation software. Within any software milieu, there will be the main players, the enthusiastic wannabes and the also-rans.

The latest incarnation of a well-established scoring package holds few surprises, but plenty of power for the asking price.

Is there a finale notepad for mac