Finale is the head of MakeMusic's notation family of entry-level Print Music, mid-range Allegro and song-writing favorite, Finale Guitar. A fierce competitor to Sibelius, it is designed for arranging, composing and printing music and offers a number of tools for playback as well.
Finale 2006 has a host of features, many of which are designed to give you more realistic playback of your scores. For example, Finale 2006 includes more than 100 sounds from the popular Garritan Personal Orchestra library to provide authentic playback to your scores. Advanced reverb is also included, and the Human Playback capabilities respond to legato and instrumental techniques. The "Studio View" mixer allows you to solo, mute and adjust each instrument's level on playback.
In addition to support for Kontakt Player included with the Garritan library, Finale will support virtually any Native Instruments product, including Kontakt, Kompakt and Reaktor.
Tempo Tap is also a feature for playback that allows you to "conduct" the performance. Much like the "NTEMPO" feature in Notion, you can enter a rhythm track into Finale and then tap the rhythm during playback - Finale will follow your tempo so you can control rit, accelerandos and any other tempo changes.
Other helpful features include a chord analysis tool, "handbells used" chart, Orff Instruments, along with split-measures, including mid-measure repeats.
We really are excited about the handbell and Orff features (these are great, especially for teachers!) However, the biggest hurrah went up for the support of integrating Native Instrument's line of samplers and soft synths directly into Finale. Yes, we really would have liked to have seen any VST instrument work with Finale, but with access to any NI based soft synth or sampler player, the majority of the products we would want to use will now integrate directly into Finale. Not only can we use the affordable but great sounding Kompakt, the full Kontakt, Reaktor and other NI products, but many of the current synths and samplers on the market use Kontakt Player so those will work as well, including East West's Symphonic Orchestra series.
The "Tempo Tap" feature is quite nifty too, and will be great when used with a suitable soft-synth for playback. However, if playback isn't your main concern, then you still might find some of the tools, such as mid-measure repeats and split measures to be useful. (Personally, I just gave up on writing music that had either of these - sure repeats save paper, but what musician hasn't missed a repeat at least once in their life?!)
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