A large portion of the development time invested in Finale 2014 was devoted to modernizing Finale for the newer Mac operating systems. While much of this development appears only “under the hood,” some glimpses can be seen in new Finale functionality including full screen mode, pinch zoom, drag-scrolling, text entry via voice dictation, and basic Retina support. This work also serves as a foundation for additional modernization required for future versions of Finale on both Mac and Windows platforms.

Whenever these types of significant changes occur in software, unforeseen consequences can arise. Despite extensive in-house and beta testing we cannot anticipate every variable of hardware, software, and workflow in the real world. As a result, we’ve seen a handful of customer issues new to 2014. After the initial release of Finale 2014 we addressed some of these concerns with the 2014a maintenance release, and continued work as new issues were discovered.

Today I’m glad to report that we’ve begun final testing of Finale 2014b, which we plan to release this spring.

Here are some highlights of Mac issues we’ve fixed in 2014b:

• Crash when using Speedy entry and scrolling with inertia (and a related issue where measures could be inadvertently copied or deleted).
• Crashes due to conflicting keyboard shortcuts.
• Crashes when opening MIDI files if it’s the first file you try to open in Finale.
• Mac crashes on waking from sleep/closing the laptop lid have been minimized, and we continue to work with Apple to eliminate them completely.
• The audio engine no longer fails to load when using Apple’s Cinema Display (or other, similar devices that only allow for a single channel of input).

We’ve also addressed some Windows-specific issues, including:

• Crash on exit (Windows 8) when clicking the X to close Finale.
• RME Hammerfall cards now work with Finale.
• Instances when backup files are deleted when an inaccessible temp file causes an error on file save.

Issues that could occur on either platform are also addressed, including:

• Articulations and key switches play back in all layers (including fp, sfz and altered trill markings which did not play back in any layers in 2014a).

And some issues not new to 2014 have been resolved as well, including:

• MIDI files exported from Finale retain staff names when opened in a DAW.

As I mentioned, we’re currently testing these and many additional improvements that we plan to share with you yet this spring.  A complete list will be included upon release of Finale 2014b.

While we’ve traditionally not announced Finale development work prior to a product release, we wanted to assure anyone who’s encountered any of the issues above that we’ve been hard at work investigating and fixing them.