Rating: 
Summary: The best when compared to the rest.
Review: There may be some short falls but Finale is tops when you factor what else is availible. Support is good. Even with all it's
power, you can still do short quick charts easily. One thing,
if you are planning on doing full concert band or ochestral scores, get the biggest monitor as you can!
Rating: 
Summary: There is indeed only one Finale
Review: To the reviewer from Moscow, ID. - who wants to buy a software application and then have to come back to Amazon and buy extra books written by third party users in order to understand how to use the software? Well the answer is nobody - except Amazon. And to say that Finale is the gold standard for profesionals is absurd. I am a professional copyist and I much prefer to use Sibelius. I only use Finale when required (I am an expert on both). And when I get Finale files from clients - the first thing I do is import them into Sibelius. Most of the publishers I deal with feel the same way.
Rating: 
Summary: OK but really not the best any more
Review: Well, I used Finale for several years and thought it must the best notation software out there, though I found it quite hard work to learn (a story I've often heard from other composers), being a musician first and foremost rather than a computer expert. Then I tried Sibelius, which took off like wildfire here in the UK a few years ago. A revelation - the difference is so great, nothing would make me go back to Finale now, after all those months of struggling with it before I could get any real work done. I mastered Sibelius in a few hours, and was writing a new piece on it the next day. The main thing I had to do was unlearn all the complications (endless dialogs etc.) that I'd had to amass for years with Finale - and had always assumed was inevitable when you bought notation software. Now I realise that it's just down to how Finale was designed (for some reason). With Sibelius, you just do the most obvious thing (click on something with the mouse, move it) and just what you expected happens. So before jumping into buying Finale I recommend you give Sibelius a serious look.
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