MakeMusic released Finale 2007 a while ago. August I believe. I’ve been using it since then, and I think I can finally review it properly.
There are not a lot great new features in Finale 2007 compared to 2006. The big feature, in fact, really the only feature that is huge, is the linked parts. Though, on MakeMusic’s preview page they harp “features” such as “Authorization Improvements“, and “Improved pickups, vertical collision remover“. There are a couple of other new things I get to. Let’s dismiss the authorization thing. That is as lame as the Copyright symbol they billed as a feature in 2006. The vertical collision remover sorta works, but not really. I can’t really see any difference in the pickups as I really didn’t do much with complex pickup measure.
So, lets dive into the reasons why you’d want to upgrade to 2007…..
The linked parts are reason enough. I won’t lie to you, they do require a little reading up on to understand how they work and they are not perfect by any means, but using linked parts really saves a ton of time. Once you get a layout you link, you can apply it to other parts. When you unlink something, it turns a different color. Updating something in the score will apply to a part. Printing linked parts and the score is a breeze. You need to see the preview of it. I can’t ever see using Extract parts to files again. It probably will end up like ETF file exports out of Finale.
If you haven’t been convinced yet that you should get Finale 2007, here are some other things that might push you over the edge.
- Latin Percussion. Really pretty darn neat. You don’t have to spend all that time to get that percussion groove notated.
- Support for Apple’s Mighty Mouse. I love my mouse!
- Universal Binary for Mac.
Last year’s upgrade to 2006 was lame. Fluff. This year’s upgrade was great. Universal Binary means a lot to new Mac owners. It is amazing how much faster 2007 runs on a Intel mac. Hopefully they will be shipping an update to 2007 that has a Kontakt player that is Universal Binary as well (ie: Kontakt sucks big time on Intel macs cuz it isn’t made for them….yet).
This is an upgrade that will save you time. You will have to read how the linked parts works, and perhaps play with them a little, but it is well worth it. 9/10