Why I buy this one ?
- Enter your music in a traditional staff, or display it automatically for a TAB staff
- An extensive library of special symbols and shapes used with notation and for over 50 fretted instruments
- Input notes with a MIDI guitar and see instant TAB notation
- Advanced music scanning technology and optical character recognition helps musicians scan sheet music and turn it into a Finale file
- Rhyming Dictionary helps songwriters find the right rhyme for any lyric

What our customer's say!

"Wasted my money on this one", I used to use Encore, which was great, but the publisher went out of business and my old version wouldn't run on Win XP. So I bought Finale Guitar. What a mistake.

IMHO, Finale is not even a proper GUI application. This program has the worst interface I have ever seen, to the point of being almost unuseable unless you spend hours a day with it.

Here's what I mean: In a typical Windows program, you select an object and then the program shows you what you can do with it. Select, then manipulate. That's not new; it's been a tenet of GUI design since day one.

Oh, but not with Finale, though. There are almost a dozen different "tools," and you have to know in advance which tool contains the function that you need before you can even select the item that you want to change. That's annoying, but it's aggravated by the fact that functions are not necessarily associated with the tool that makes sense.

And it gets worse, because the "help system" is nothing more than a gazillion MB PDF of the manual. Tooltips? Fuhgeddaboutit. Context help? Are you kiddin' me? I defy any new user to change the key of a song without consulting at least two sections of the manual.

Everything about this program is harder to use than it needs to be. I guess this must be to maintain compatibility with the 1980s DOS version or something, because I can think of no reason why someone would design a Windows or Mac program to work in such a non-intuitive and bass-ackwards fashion.

I'm switching to Sibelius, which is what I should have bought in the first place. I can't get Finale off of my computer soon enough.

"Beware of Limitations", I have gone from the the free Notepad program to, I think it was, Notepad Plus? Then when I found out that those programs could not have more than one time signature in a piece I decided to go with Finale Guitar. This program WAS able to do this. Then I found out that if I place a pickup measure at the start of a piece and wanted to place a repeat back to the beginning I could not do this from half-way through a measure. In other words, if a piece in 4/4 has a pickup measure containing one quarter note, I cannot repeat from a measure that has three quarter notes. I contacted support and after two days they came back with the answer that the software could not do this, but that I could upgrade to the current version of Finale. I asked for a workaround and they have not replied after three more days. Also, Finale Guitar will not read files that you do in the Free version because it is based on 2003 code.

I have to also echo the comments of others that this is not easy to use. I am getting used to things but being an occassional user I have to spend a lot of unnecessary time figuring things out every time I use it. I have worked with computers since the 80s and been a software trainer, so I am not without experience. It is far from intuitive. The free product was great for what it was, but I am disappointed in this paid for older version. It did overcome some limitations and I think the tab creation may be of use to a lot of people. By the way, when I had both standard notation and tab on the same sheet I could never figure out how to change the auto generated tab to play something in a different position. Perhaps you can, but I just gave up on it.

The three stars are for being able to do what I have done so far, which is make printouts of music pieces for my students in both standard notation and tab. I have a link to the free version on my webpage www.guitar-lessons.us, but I am going to look at the Sibelius products that seem to have better reviews. My boxed copy of this program may be going on ebay soon or I may see if there is a good trade up offered to another program. Not a complete waste of money and probably the full 2006 version may be much better. It's just too much money for the amount of use that I would give it.

"Slow and difficult to learn", I purchased Finale Guitar to finally get onto paper all of the hundreds of guitar arrangements I currently play from memory. It was a reasonably priced non-shareware guitar notation program so I thought it would be better. Well after using the program for several months, I am still having to go to the help files just to do the simplest of tasks. First of all I am a computer programmer, so I regularly learn and use all sorts of computer programs. I understand that everything has a learning curve, but this program is very frustrating in that it is not at all intuative. The main frustration comes from the fact that EVERYTHING that should be simple and out front or copy/pasteable is buried in a menu and dialog box somewhere. Also not all of the objects on the page can be simply "copied and cloned", then properties of the copied item changed, like a word processor. Even selection of things to be copied often requires some special dialog to copy it in a certain way. In other words if you are expecting to be able to put a chord on the page, then copy and paste it 20 times and simply change the attributes of all your copies to new chords, you are out of luck, you will basically have to do each from scratch. Also if you need to change the key without transposing the notes you are out of luck. Most operations cannot be done with copy/paste, you must go through all the gyrations of buried menus over and over, not much of just right clicking to get a properties window that does what you expected. It appears that they tried to simplify things by forcing you into a 'mode' for every separate operation rather than just picking one simple sequence that people understand and making all operations conform to that. I was not looking for a program to do midi playback/creation I wanted an easy and powerful notation program to get stuff on paper, so I am not reviewing the sound/midi aspects. This may be powerful but it's difficulty and laborious editing processes make it extremely frustrating for someone doing manual editing. Also it does not come with very good templates for popular music, the lead sheet templates or example do not contain the codas or repeat endings, one of the difficult operation to learn, so to create a fake sheet you will have to learn how to do repeat endings and codas right out of the box yourself. This alone will probably take you a few evenings to learn. You will also spend another evening trying to figure out how to evenly space your sytems and staffs. Then more time to do the next thing, etc. You will probably not get much done, with manual entry, because the learing curve is so slow. This is coming from someone who has been using computers for over 30 years, long before PC's. Needless to say, I will be switching to a different notation program. Also the PDF user manual that comes with this product is fragmented into dozens of separate files, to read it you have to constantly click back to the TOC and open a different PDF, again slow and unsearchable as a whole. Also the copuple of times I went to the support forum, the web site was breaking with MySQL errors. I am not at all happy with this program but I do not have a recomendation for anything else at this time. I will be reading other revierws here for a program that is fast and easy with manual entry tasks.



"Not an OS X application", What it doesn't say here nor on the finalemusic.com website is, this is an OS 9 ("classic") application. If you have managed finally to dispense with all your "classic" Mac applications, you'll want to think twice before ordering this one. It's so "classic" that the Installer tells you it can't be run under OS X but you must REBOOT into OS 9 before installing!

This was a shock, because the same company's Finale NotePad -- surely the best value in free software anywhere! -- does run native in OS X.

"Great for a Beginner or Advanced Musician-at a low price", I received this software on Christmas this year in addition with a MIDI keyboard. This software is excellent! Some say that they prefer Sibelius software but I disagree. This software gives you the power to enter notes in seconds, play with a swing feeling, print, and publish to the web in seconds. If people tell you that this software is aggravating then they do not know what they are talking about. Even if you don't have a MIDI connection, you can simply type notes in on your computer keyboard. If you do not trust what I am saying, go to www.finalemusic.com and download Finale Notepad software. If you also do not want to spend $75 on this software, buy Finale Printmusic! software. for $46.88. on this website. And, if you buy this software and master it, you can upgrade to Finale which is possibly the world's best music producing software.