MakeMusic! Inc. has offered details about the forthcoming release of Finale 2004, the latest update to the company’s music notation software. The new version will ship with native support for Mac OS X, although it won’t be released until two months after its PC counterpart.
Finale 2004 sports improvements like “human playback,” which adds more natural feeling, phrasing and nuance, according to the developers. It also incorporates the SmartMusic Sound Font, which is used in SmartMusic Studio. Finale also sports simplified note entry, the ability to apply pre-made drum parts, improvements to editing and expression customization, and much more.
But of more specific importance to Mac users, the new version of Finale finally gains support for Mac OS X. In addition to being Carbonized and supporting the Aqua user interface, Finale 2004 adds support for CoreMIDI, the native Mac OS X MIDI interface. (FreeMIDI and OMS are still required if you’re using Mac OS 9). Save as PDF has been added, long and Unicode file names are supported, and more.
The Windows version of Finale 2004 ships on August 20, 2003, but the Mac version won’t ship until two months later — October 20. Upgrades are available — users need to input online account registration data to access that info.