Coda Finale 2003
Coda Finale 2003 Notation Editing And Publishing Package
Reviews : Software: ALL
Finale 2003 is highly customisable: all the toolbars are movable, and the on-screen colours can be freely selected by the user.
Coda's Finale is one of the best-established notation editing packages for Mac OS and Windows, and has just undergone a thorough overhaul for 2003...
Richard Leon
It's frightening to think that Finale, one of the first serious notation editors, has been around for the best part of a decade now. The 2003 tag attached to the latest version highlights the fact that this is a package with a long and respected pedigree. While Coda's claims that it's a world standard aren't quite true — at least not if you include those parts of the world outside the US — there's no arguing that Finale has managed to build a solid market for itself among both professional arrangers and educational users.
It's not hard to see why. While the notation facilities built into sequencers such as Cubase and Logic are competent, they lack some of the more advanced tools that Finale can offer, and their output doesn't look as appealing or as professional. Because Finale was designed to replace laborious traditional music engraving as well as provide a working environment for composers and arrangers, it has always gone that bit further with what it can produce on a printed page. Early versions weren't perhaps as easy to use as they could have been, but it's now possible to input music using a mouse, a QWERTY keyboard, a MIDI instrument, or any combination of the above. The current version can also notate directly from a monophonic sound recording.
What's New
The latest update has left most of the core of Finale unchanged, and it's still available for both Mac and PC. Visually the biggest change is a new look and feel — or rather, seven new looks and feels. (Coda claim there are 14, but this is a slight exaggeration: there's a basic set of seven, available in two sizes.) Although this change is cosmetic, it does make a real difference. The new sculpted 3D look of the buttons makes the interface clearer and easier to work with. You can even pick your own colours, albeit from a limited and mostly rather sober range, and there's also the option to customise the background with your own graphics. Stick-in-the-mud traditionalists can carry on using the original look.
One minor interface niggle hasn't been addressed, however. The various toolbars can be parked anywhere on the screen, but the process is fiddly and a couple of the toolbars seem to appear and disappear when they want to, rather than staying put as they should. The rationale may be to save space, but big monitors with resolutions of 1280 x 1024 and higher are becoming standard, so Coda should stop second-guessing what users do and don't want to see and just give people as much as they want.
Coda Finale 2003 £479
pros
Outstanding, musically intelligent plug-ins.
Useful sheet music scanning feature.
Impressive MIDI guitar and fretted tab support.
cons
Non-trivial learning curve.
Playback could be more musical.
summary
While not quite the ultimate notation and preview tool for the very pickiest and most demanding composers, Finale is much more than just a competent alternative. It's ideal for both professional composers and arrangers, music students and anyone who wants to give their scores a professional finish.
On the subject of monitors, more is definitely better. I used a 1600 x 1200 monitor, which was big enough to show the various tools and palettes in their entirety, and 1024 x 768 is really the absolute bare minimum for Finale. Working with a smaller screen area means too many options disappear, and editing becomes very awkward and slow.
In Black And White
New customisation features include various program and document options. You can change all the most important settings to create your own library of blank templates for various arranging jobs, using various paper sizes, looks, fonts and other details. This small change makes a big difference in practice, as there's no longer any need to keep defining your instrument palette every time you start a new project. Now you can switch between arranging for strings and composing for four-part choir just by loading a new preset.
The range of customisation options available here is huge, and includes almost every page layout detail you can imagine. You can control basics such as beaming and ties, how rests and accidentals are displayed, how to handle grace notes, tuplets and bar lines, and more than 20 other options. These bread-and-butter parts of the notation control are surprisingly comprehensive, and include various specialised beaming, accidental and other music printing options. Overall, if you need it, it's likely that Finale can do it.
The alternative Jazz font is useful for a less formal handwritten look.
Also included here are more advanced page-related features such as grids and guides, line spacing, fonts, and Finale's layers feature, which comes into its own when writing four independent parts on two staves. Instead of being limited to a single symbol set on a page, you can choose different looks for repeats, piano braces, bar lines, and other musical essentials. You can even create your own staff definitions, with anywhere from one to 100 lines instead of the usual six, and you can add your own clef types to the impressive range that's already supplied. The overall picture here is one of depth and sophistication. You don't have to use these more esoteric features if you don't want to, but for those times when you need to create something out of the ordinary, it's reassuring to know that they're there. A related improvement is improved pitch notation. You can now notate using Kodaly-style 'do re mi' notation, which hides the main staff and uses shorthand to show which pitch to sing or play. Rhythm notation has also been improved.
By default Finale includes two music fonts: the classical Maestro and a handwritten-look font called Jazz. You can customise both music and the text on a page to an astounding degree, using different fonts for lyrics, expression marks, verses and choruses, and even using non-music fonts for music. Being able to save all these settings en masse for each kind of project you work on is a real Godsend.
Teachers will be impressed by the new Worksheet Wizard. This provides blank templates for literally thousands of different kinds of musical exercises, and all you have to do is fill in the blanks and print out the results.
Plugged In
A close-up of Finale's toolbars. These include all the editing and MIDI playback features; more obscure options are buried in the menus.
One of the most impressive of all Finale's features is a dizzying range of music processing plug-ins. These range from basic chores, such as checking for parallel fifths and octaves, to full automated harmony generation. The sophistication of the tools here is breathtaking, and they'll be appreciated by composers and arrangers of all skill levels. You can morph and process chords in various sophisticated ways, play with melody lines, create rhythm parts, and work with lyrics. There are almost endless creative possibilities here, especially in the Composer's Assistant section, which offers tools like the virtual fundamental generator, chord splitter, and frequency modulation generator. Counterpoint students will also appreciate the tools that allow easy retrogrades (ie. playing the music backwards) and inversions (playing it upside down). Taken together, these are rather like parts of a modular synthesizer that works with raw notes instead of sound, and are only bettered in scope by obscure and complicated academic tools like the fearsomely complex Lisp-based CommonMusic.
For those who aren't quite so experimentally minded, there are also auto-harmony and auto-rhythm options, which work in Band In A Box kind of way. While both the theory and practice are good, the supplied presets are a little limited, ranging from boom-chicka bossa nova to chunky bepop, standard ballad and middle-of-the-road swing varieties. They all work more or less as advertised, but some good rock, dub, indie and electronica styles would have brought the house down here.
If you prefer words to music, Finale's lyric support is second to none. Not only is there a vast array of lyric positioning tools, but Finale also includes a built-in rhyming dictionary that is better than some shop-bought printed dictionaries. While some of the suggestions are a tad adventurous ('pain' with 'afterbrain'? — perhaps another time...) many are right on the nail. It's not an exaggeration to say that if you can't write a song with the help of this tool, you should think about giving up and putting more time into the day job.
Mac
Strings & Things
System Requirements
PC
Windows 98 or later, 128MB RAM, 70MB disk space, scanner, printer and MIDI input device.
Mac OS 8.6 or higher (runs under OS X in Classic mode), 128MB RAM, 70MB disk space, scanner, printer and MIDI input device.
Another major plus in this new version is improved support for fretted instruments. This is also among the best available, and you can now create tablature for assorted kinds of guitars, banjos and ukeleles. Finale has always been a good choice for tab creation, but these new features really stand out, and if you have a MIDI guitar you can play in real time and the music will be tabbed immediately. There are all kinds of nice touches here which lift this section of the package out of the ordinary, making it easy to notate bends, hammer-offs, slides and other kinds of fretted expression. There's also a range of tab libraries so you can select the style and look that best suit your project.
Guitar input aside, it's worth noting that the rest of the MIDI support hasn't been updated in this release. Both step and real-time input are still available, the latter using a feature called Hyperscribe. Finale remains good enough for the basics, but its ability to make sense of very complicated playing is limited. You have to specify the time signature in advance, and tempo changes can only be tracked manually using a second recording pass where you tap out the tempo yourself. This is workable for arranging pop music, but classical players may have to resort to stitching different recorded sections together by hand if the music has varying time signatures. If you need to notate complicated tuplets, you'll have to enter those in step time. To be fair these are all advanced requirements, and Finale isn't any worse at them than most of the competition. Still, it would be good to have software that could transcribe music as well as a professionally trained transcriber. Perhaps in a future release?
The look of each piece can be customised to a bewildering degree. Here are various repeats and brackets.
The other obvious limitation is that only 64 MIDI instruments are supported. This sounds like a lot, and is certainly enough for basic arranging and printing of scores from piano up to full 32-stave orchestra. But if you're a professional composer with two or more Gigasampler PCs stuffed to the floppy drive with hundreds of orchestral samples, the restriction may begin to pinch a little. Fortunately, there's a workaround that lets you switch between different playing styles on a given instrument, for instance arco, legato and pizzicato strings. Finale lets you insert program changes with custom text so you can easily configure playback performance to your own specifications. If your sampler responds fast enough, you can even highlight a single note. While it's possible to insert crescendos and other dynamic markings using both velocity and controller curves, the process is rather fiddly and takes more time than it should. Similarly, ornaments such as trills and shakes are easy to notate, but not so easy to play back. On the other side of the coin is Finale's Shape Designer, a flexible environment for creating your own customised playback options. You can define shapes graphically, and then map them to various playback parameters such as tempo, velocity, pitch and so on. Anyone without programming experience or good IT skills may find this part of the package a little lateral, because the interface isn't particularly musical, but those who take the time to master it will find there's plenty of scope for creating expressive playback.
Verdict
It remains true that Finale's learning curve can still leave beginners feeling a little breathless, but while it still lacks the very advanced playback features of some of the competition, it leads in many other areas. Overall, most of its drawbacks are limited to esoteric and obscure shortcomings that many users won't notice. Those aside, it provides a solid, wide-ranging and comprehensive set of features that will suit almost anyone. If you're an experimental contemporary classical composer and need every last possible obscure notation option and the best available MIDI playback, you may find it just a touch limited, especially in the latter area. But anyone with less extreme and exacting requirements — and that means almost everyone else — will find that it should do more than enough to meet their needs. The fact that Finale remains the notation tool of choice for the Hollywood film set and for Broadway arrangers proves that it can cut it in a professional environment. It's also a fair bit cheaper than its main competitor, Sibelius.
So should you buy it? If you use Cubase or Logic for notation and aren't finding those frustrating or limiting, then the more sophisticated options in Finale may be overkill for you. But if you spend most of your time working with notation, would appreciate the extra possibilities offered by sheet music scanning, MIDI guitar tab and DTP-level control of the way music appears on a page, then Finale is an excellent musical all-rounder, and well worth considering seriously. Of course, it's still true that there's nothing quite like composing with a pencil and a big pad of manuscript. But for those less romantic times when you need to produce output that people can actually read without squinting painfully, Finale remains a great package. 
Scanning From Paper
Finale's built-in sheet music scanning is among the best and most accurate at the price, and tests showed that it does a surprisingly good, if not quite perfect job of pulling piano music off paper. The package used is called SmartScore Lite, and is included as something of a very basic teaser for two upgrade options — the full-featured SmartScore Pro for $199, and SmartScore Songbook for $99. The former handles full 32-stave orchestral music, while the latter works with three-line piano-plus-vocal printed songs. Given that when you buy an album of printed music you'll often see drum parts and other extra lines, anyone who's planning to use scanning a lot should consider the Pro version. If you already have SmartScore, or its competitor SharpEye, you'll find that you can import directly into Finale without the problems that sometimes occurred with earlier versions.
Test Spec
Coda Finale 2003.
Athlon XP 2100+ PC with 512MB RAM running Windows XP; 1600 x 1200 24-bit graphics.
information
£479; educational price £199.
Crossgrades and upgrades from earlier versions available.
Prices include VAT.
Et Cetera +44 (0)870 873 8731.
0870 873 8732.
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www.codamusic.com
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