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Is MUSESCORE really the future of music notation?

Maybe but not yet by a long shot.

MuseScore 4 is no longer horrible but it's still not very good. MuseScore 5 is supposed to be chock full of AI goodies so that it can compete with the big boys and become the de facto notation app for Hal Leonard, the largest music publisher in the world—and wholly owned by Cyprus based Muse Group, flush with billion$ of cash from Russia based Ultimate Guitar.

We'll see...

Meanwhile, Sibelius and Dorico have attractive cross-grade offers for Finale customers. Dorico's includes an upgrade license to Finale 27 but it's available for current Finale customers. Dorico released a more "Finale friendly" upgrade a couple days ago.

Finale 27 runs on every Mac made between 2012–2025. Although I have licenses for Dorico, MuseScore, Notion 6 and a few other apps, I'm staying with Finale for now. I get a lot of work translating MuseScore into Finale for a few publishing houses.

If it works great over Windows, that's fine but I cannot recommend Notion 6 for Mac users. Too much of it including the playback engine is still 32 bit. Fender told us that Notion 7 was "coming soon", back in November 2021. They could have made Notion 6 64bit in the mean time. I am not holding my breath. My crystal ball predicts that we will never see Notion 7 — I'd be happy to be wrong.

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BIAB 2024 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5