MakeMusic! Inc. announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Berklee College of Music whereby Berklee will provide incoming students with Apple Macintosh computers including MakeMusic’s Finale music notation software and SmartMusic software as part of the required bundle. The combination of Finale and SmartMusic on all student and college computers will allow Berklee to present more effectively its undergraduate curriculum.
“Finale, the award winning music notation software that is widely regarded as the industry standard, is already used extensively by faculty and students at Berklee. Its power, flexibility and unique compositional and arranging features make it ideal for academic environments… ‘We standardized on Finale years ago for our school-owned computers,’ stated David Mash, Berklee’s Vice President for Information Technology. ‘This fall we will begin requiring new students to have the latest Apple Macintosh computers with the best software pre-installed in order to insure they will be ready for Berklee classes. Finale and SmartMusic work together in unique ways that will provide important advantages to both students and faculty,'” reports Music Industry News Network here.
The only problem is that Finale is still not carbonized for Mac OS X. Users needing good notation software now should look at Sibelius (http://www.sibelius.com/) or the less polished (but much less expensive!) Harmony Assistant (http://www.myriad-online.com/enindex.htm).
Let’s hope that this encourages Coda to make Finale available for Mac OS X…
Sibelius is the new challenger to Finale and has already moved to OS X. Finale will be available as an OS X compatible product sometime late this year.
That being said, I am seriously disappointed in the severe limitations of both Sibelius and Finale. I work in three microtonal music systems (Cairo Convention, Iranian & Turkish) that use specialized notation and have special conventions. So far, neither Sibelius or Finale support microtonality in Midi and other than incredibly obtuse kludges, fail badly in supporting notation. A free set of fonts is available to Turkish Finale users via the non-sytandard key signatures in Finale, but using Finale’s non-standard key signatures feature is an excercise in hellish frustration to get it to work. Sibelius has not a clue.
Perhaps someone over there should get a clue and realize that entire music publishing industries for a large portion of this planet are studiously ignored by the Big Boys. Once someone figures it out they will be the ones to get a lock on a significant portion of the planet. That is something close to a half billion people! Despite what Finale and Sibelius’ market people think, that is NOT an “insignificant” market!