On the morning, Wednesday, August 28th (Japan time), MakeMusic, the developer of Finale, announced a solution to allow all registered users of the company who have purchased or plan to purchase a Dorico Pro crossgrade to download Finale v27.
▼The End of Finale (August 26, 2024 Greg Dell'Era)
First of all, to avoid any misunderstanding, this announcement was made by MakeMusic, not the Japanese domestic sales agent. Therefore, if you have any questions about obtaining Finale v27, you should contact MakeMusic, not the Japanese domestic distributor.
This is currently being implemented in the following form, which was added to the blog on August 30th.
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Finale v27 upgrades now included with Dorico Pro crossgrades: Earlier in the week, we announced that we were currently working on a solution for all customers who have purchased or intend to purchase a Dorico Pro crossgrade to be able to download Finale v27. This is now live for all Finale users. With Finale v27, you will be able to export your Finale files using MusicXML 4.0, the most robust version of MusicXML available. Head to the eStore or log in to your MakeMusic account to get started.
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As mentioned in a previous blog, Finale sales and license management vary by country. For this reason, v27 provided by MakeMusic is the English version, not the Japanese version.
Finale is not a so-called multilingual application, and the English and Japanese versions are separate products.
When transferring files, what is more important than the fact that the user interface languages are different is that the standard music notation font is Kousaku in the Japanese version of Finale, while it is Finale Maestro in the English version of Finale, and the English version of Finale cannot load the Kousaku font as is.
For this reason, when you load a file created with the Kousaku font in the Japanese version of Finale into the English version of Finale, you will see the following error message.
If you have already installed the Japanese version of Finale, the Maestro font is installed, so you can generally open the file normally with “Auto-Generate”. However, depending on the version of Finale and the OS you are using, this may not work, and symbols may be garbled when you open the file.
However, this garbled symbol is simply a display issue in the English version of Finale and has no effect on file exchange with MusicXML.
Even if the symbol is garbled when you open a file with the English version of Finale v27, don't worry about it, just export it to MusicXML and import it into other products such as Dorico or Sibelius. The symbol will not be garbled there and will be imported normally.
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Finale v27 also has several thousand SMuFL symbols that were not included in v26 and earlier. Therefore, you may want to take advantage of this and finish the file you are working on in v26 or earlier in v27 before exporting it to MusicXML.
In that case, it is a bit of a hassle, but there is a way to handle files created in the Japanese version of Finale in the English version. For details, please see the following article.
▼“What’s New on Finale 27.4” & How to use files created with the Japanese version of Finale (including measures against garbled characters)
(※This is probably not covered by technical support. If you experience any problems, please perform a clean install of Finale.)