Finale Guitar 2003 Description:

Finale Guitar 2003 review:
2 stars (Slow and difficult to learn) - I purchased Finale Guitar to finally get onto paper all of the hundreds of guitar arrangements I currently play from memory. It was a reasonably priced non-shareware guitar notation program so I thought it would be better. Well after using the program for several months, I am still having to go to the help files just to do the simplest of tasks. First of all I am a computer programmer, so I regularly learn and use all sorts of computer programs. I understand that everything has a learning curve, but this program is very frustrating in that it is not at all intuative. The main frustration comes from the fact that EVERYTHING that should be simple and out front or copy/pasteable is buried in a menu and dialog box somewhere. Also not all of the objects on the page can be simply "copied and cloned", then properties of the copied item changed, like a word processor. Even selection of things to be copied often requires some special dialog to copy it in a certain way. In other words if you are expecting to be able to put a chord on the page, then copy and paste it 20 times and simply change the attributes of all your copies to new chords, you are out of luck, you will basically have to do each from scratch. Also if you need to change the key without transposing the notes you are out of luck. Most operations cannot be done with copy/paste, you must go through all the gyrations of buried menus over and over, not much of just right clicking to get a properties window that does what you expected. It appears that they tried to simplify things by forcing you into a 'mode' for every separate operation rather than just picking one simple sequence that people understand and making all operations conform to that. I was not looking for a program to do midi playback/creation I wanted an easy and powerful notation program to get stuff on paper, so I am not reviewing the sound/midi aspects. This may be powerful but it's difficulty and laborious editing processes make it extremely frustrating for someone doing manual editing. Also it does not come with very good templates for popular music, the lead sheet templates or example do not contain the codas or repeat endings, one of the difficult operation to learn, so to create a fake sheet you will have to learn how to do repeat endings and codas right out of the box yourself. This alone will probably take you a few evenings to learn. You will also spend another evening trying to figure out how to evenly space your sytems and staffs. Then more time to do the next thing, etc. You will probably not get much done, with manual entry, because the learing curve is so slow. This is coming from someone who has been using computers for over 30 years, long before PC's. Needless to say, I will be switching to a different notation program. Also the PDF user manual that comes with this product is fragmented into dozens of separate files, to read it you have to constantly click back to the TOC and open a different PDF, again slow and unsearchable as a whole. Also the copuple of times I went to the support forum, the web site was breaking with MySQL errors. I am not at all happy with this program but I do not have a recomendation for anything else at this time. I will be reading other revierws here for a program that is fast and easy with manual entry tasks.




2 stars (Not an OS X application) - What it doesn't say here nor on the finalemusic.com website is, this is an OS 9 ("classic") application. If you have managed finally to dispense with all your "classic" Mac applications, you'll want to think twice before ordering this one. It's so "classic" that the Installer tells you it can't be run under OS X but you must REBOOT into OS 9 before installing!



This was a shock, because the same company's Finale NotePad -- surely the best value in free software anywhere! -- does run native in OS X.
5 stars (Great for a Beginner or Advanced Musician-at a low price) - I received this software on Christmas this year in addition with a MIDI keyboard. This software is excellent! Some say that they prefer Sibelius software but I disagree. This software gives you the power to enter notes in seconds, play with a swing feeling, print, and publish to the web in seconds. If people tell you that this software is aggravating then they do not know what they are talking about. Even if you don't have a MIDI connection, you can simply type notes in on your computer keyboard. If you do not trust what I am saying, go to www.finalemusic.com and download Finale Notepad software. If you also do not want to spend $75 on this software, buy Finale Printmusic! software. for $46.88. on this website. And, if you buy this software and master it, you can upgrade to Finale which is possibly the world's best music producing software.