The State of the Art, circa 1991

[Fred G. Unn]

Went down a bit of a rabbit hole today and stumbled on a review summarizing the state of music notation software 30 years ago. For anyone with a JSTOR account the review is simply titled "Music Notation Software" and is by Karl Signell, published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 136-148.

The review covers The Copyist III, Finale, MusicPrinter Plus, Music Writer, Personal Composer, SCORE, Theme, NoteWriter, and Professional Composer. Anyway, here are a few pages for anyone interested. I found it amusing that SCORE 3.0, the same version many people are still using today, he labels as "unfriendly interface" in 1991, LOL!

[John Ruggero]

I remember reading this article or perhaps an early review of Finale when I first became interesting in notation software. The writer thought that the automatic spacing concept was a big mistake, probably for the reason given on the first page above.

[Fred G. Unn]

The inflation rate between 1991 and today has been almost 95% (in USD) so that $749 Finale price tag would be in $1,459 today's dollars. Gulp! I think I remember it being $600 when I bought it in 1993 or 1994, but I was in school so it was half off. Not a lot of info out there but looks like Encore was released in 1992, so missed this review. I might be wrong, but I don't think the Acorn version of Sibelius was publicly available yet, certainly not in the US anyway.

[RMK]

Finale was $1,000 when I purchased my copy (late 80's?). I had a 3-digit serial number!

I also paid $2,500 for a Mac Plus (no hard drive, 1MB of memory) and $5,000 for an Apple laser printer (300 dpi, letter or legal size paper only).

[OCTO]

What a wonderful history. I have heard about Finale in 1997, then a student, and a friend told me that it can enter grace notes. I remember how happy I was.

[Anders Hedelin]

The first time I worked with Finale was in the middle of the 90's, on a Mac Classic (?), the small cube with computer and screen all in one. I recall when making a change to the music, even the smallest one like dotting a note, the screen had to redraw itself - and it took about 10 seconds each time. I had all the time in the world at the time, so that was no problem. I was simply thrilled by having access to this brave new technology.

[benwiggy]

Me too! I was commissioned to typeset a new composition for a Cathedral choir in 1994. The choir school had a little Mac SE (with the 9-inch 512 by 342 pixel screen!) and a copy of MusicProse 2.1, which was a cut-down version of Finale. Of course, the manual was missing, and there was no internet Help, so I had to discover everything (It took me several years to work out why I could enter nothing but rests in Speedy Entry).

My work was awful, it has to be said. But I was fascinated by the process (however laborious) and what you could produce. I used a new document whenever a new page called for a different number of staves, because I didn't know how to do staff hiding (and I hadn't looked ahead when I started).

[Anders Hedelin]

I also recall my first impression of Finale when I had a glimpse of what a colleague of mine was working with. I thought "this is just SO primitive". Much later I understood he must have been in Scroll View.