I may have solved a problem.

On Monday, after I posted my faux-post, I got to work on the biggest problem facing me in my creative life, and that is the extinction of Finale, the industry-standard music notation program for over 30 years. As we all know by now — because I’ve whined enough about it — the two contenders to replace it (Dorico, from Steinberg; and MuseScore, open source) are, to put it mildly, pallid replacements with bizarre workflows and inadequate playback options.

“But Dale,” you will reply, “they give you little videos on how to navigate their bizarre workflows.” As a lifetime educator, allow me to say that their little videos are not as instructive as they might think. So, MuseScore and Dorico, if those are even your real names, I am available for a large sum of money to restructure your training.

At any rate, now, one year after Finale committed seppuku, I made up my mind to try to cling to Finale as long as I can. The problem is that after they closed up shop last August, assuring us that Finale would work until it didn’t, Apple announced its new operating system in September, followed by an announcement from Finale that said new OS would kill Finale once and for all. So I’ve gone nearly a year without upgrading my laptop.

All day Monday I wrestled with what you might think is a simple idea: Install MacOS Sonoma (14.7.6) on a bootable external hard drive, along with Finale and Garritan Personal Orchestra 5. That way I can keep Sonoma on hand specifically to keep using Finale as long as I can.

It’s not an actual solution yet; the external drive is laggy, although Finale seems to work fine. I haven’t yet tried working on a new piece, but opening all my old stuff works. It also occurred to me after a day’s struggle with installing, rebooting, etc etc, that I can leave all my music files on my actual laptop and just snag them from there. That avoids having duplicate files littering cyberspace. More work is required, as we say in the Lichtenbergian Society.

I am cautiously hopeful. It’s not the best solution — the best solution would be for me to buy a new laptop and just keep this one as my composing station, but that would require me to win the lottery or be paid large sums of money to revamp MuseScore’s educational material.

And MuseScore, if I may call you that, this gives you time to circle back and simplify your workflows.