MusicRadar

Finale 2010 enables you to produce better-looking scores than ever.

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• Review

Sounds

Included with Finale 2010 is an expanded soundbank from Garritan, and joining the pre-existing orchestra sounds are electric guitars and bass, a brushed drum kit, church organs, synth sounds and more.

While it remains the case that anyone wishing to create a detailed and convincing audio track would be best off using a sequencer, these are still welcome additions, especially for those who use Finale's playback as a compositional aid.

Still, the primary purposes of having audio playback in Finale for most users will be note-checking with sounds that resemble the instruments they're allocated to, and secondly, to provide a hint of how the score might sound if played by real instruments – as a demo version for others, perhaps.

Other Finale audio features, such as the importing or recording of a single audio track, may be useful for some musicians, but probably irrelevant to the majority who seek to use Finale purely as a scorewriter.

Summary

Such audio-related features are undoubtedly attractive, but if we think of Finale as a tool for producing printed scores, then it's the improvements in the ease of input and the quality of output that are crucial.

To this end, the aforementioned refinements, such as percussion handling, would seem important in the streamlining of workflow, whereas improvements in the audio field, whilst positive, are less relevant to Finale's main job.

Less flashy but more genuinely useful are the clutch of pre-prepared worksheets, which should prove handy for those working in education.

Finale 2010 builds on an already impressive application, and the high mark awarded reflects this ongoing excellence as much as the value of the new features. Even in previous versions, you could create excellent printouts, so perhaps this is why MakeMusic has been exploring the software's audio side in recent years, searching for an edge.

So do you need Finale? For banging out a few string parts or brass overdubs, your existing sequencer, if it has a score editor, may suffice. Otherwise, you could consider a lesser-endowed but considerably cheaper member of the Finale family – see the MakeMusic website for details.

But if you need to produce sophisticated and extensive scores and parts, up to publication quality, you should definitely consider Finale and try the save-disabled trial version.

And lastly, existing Finale users should look carefully at the new developments in 2010 and ask themselves how much they would enhance the uses they put the software to.

Listen to the opening of Beethoven's String Quartet in C# Minor, played back in Finale 2010: