Since 2000, Finale has offered a freeware titled Finale NotePad, which was a very watered-down version of Finale. As an elementary music educator, I adored this application because its limitations were excellent for my elementary students. For example, I used Finale NotePad 2005 to successfully prove my research project where 2nd graders in the experimental group 2 who composed using Finale NotePad learned and retained more about basic musical skills than the 2nd graders in the experimental group 1 who composed using traditional manuscript paper and pencil. Last year, my 3rd graders used Finale NotePad 2008 to compose a song about the state that they were studying for their 50 States Fair. All of these projects and others were done using the freeware Finale NotePad.
Unfortunately, MakeMusic decided to charge $9.95 for Finale NotePad 2009 so that they could add more features that users were requesting such as an all-new Expression Tool and the ability to import/export MusicXML files. Currently, you can no longer find the older versions of the freeware on their site. I do understand why MakeMusic chose to do this, and it is a great program for only $9.95. However, the two huge benefits to Finale NotePad was that you could put it on any computer in the school and your students could use it at anytime of the day and feel success using it because it was easy-to-use and it was free. That meant that when my 2nd or 3rd graders had free choice in their daily classrooms, they could go to the classroom computer and launch Finale NotePad. It also meant that I could sign out time in the computer lab and Finale NotePad would be on every computer for each student to use.
I am saddened by MakeMusic’s decision to discontinue their freeware and begin charging for the product. I am especially saddened for those financially struggling school districts where $9.95 for a software program to be placed on each computer would be difficult to accommodate. I was enlightened to read Joe Pisano’s post about the freeware MuseScore because if you are a PC user or your school has PCs, then you have an excellent composition freeware to replace your Finale NotePad. Unfortunately, it is not compatible for a MAC yet.
How do you feel about this? Will this make a difference in your music classroom if you had been using a notation program? I look forward to reading your comments.
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October 20th, 2008 at 1:19 am
This was sad news for me, and for my students. I loved using the program for my middle school general music classes, and often empolyed it with my orchestra students as well. It is really unfortunate that Makemusic has made this decision.
I don’t have any satisfactory solution to their decision, and know that at some point, we will have to stop using the Finale 2008 program. Fortunately, all of our computers (Macs) have the 2008 version already installed, so as long as it works with our current operating system we should still be able to use it. I’m hoping to still get a couple of years more out of it! Perhaps there will be a solution for me at that point.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:26 am
[…] If it could save your composition as a MIDI file, then I would feel like I found the free version of Finale NotePad (Finale NotePad is now $9.95). […]