I totally agree!
Don, please at least finish MasterTracksPro.
You once told me that it’s your favorite program and holds a lot of sentimental value for you.

— the prerequisite is to ensure that all users have PDF versions on disk of all their files.

As you and I have been advocating for years, Encore files must be saved as PDF if one has any hope of using them again.

— that I understand from all the discussions made here, the only practical tool is to use the PDFtoMusic product:

++ PDFtoMusicPro as a standalone tool to create XML2 version of the Encore files

It’s better than nothing but it isn’t as good as it should be… 1) If it doesn’t have the font in its library, it’s useless and 2) It’s MusicXML implementation is pretty poor — many things throw it off. 3) If you want to test this, export anything with dashed slurs from MuseScore and then try to import into PDFtoMusic Pro (PDFtoMusic cannot export MusicXML). Have your original PDF file open so that you can compare. Brace yourself for disappointment. When conditions are right, it’s a real time saver but I often find it faster and much more accurate to re-enter an old Encore project from scratch into Finale.

++ Plan PDFtoMusic for the users wanting to use Harmony Assistant as their future music editor.

Harmony Assistant is laughingly horrible on a Mac. It can’t read System Text and Lyric fonts — every Mac app absolutely, positively Must be able to do that. Likewise, it can’t read 3rd party fonts made available to All Applications — what I said about System Fonts. I’ve even posted here how to make embedded 3rd party app fonts available to all applications and Users on a Mac. I wish I could post screen shots. It may or may not get the notes right in an Encore file.

These methods require to become efficient with these products, perhaps with a user’s guide.

Good luck with that. Myriad Software would have to be interested in improving their apps. I’ve seen no reason to believe this will ever happen.

Would a forum be something useful?

I’m fine with this one and have no interest in another.

As I get older, I find I have less time for things that just don’t work anymore. Encore 5.0.7 for Mac makes too many mistakes thanks to buggy code. Since I always export to PDF, it’s not my imagination. I had to stop using it while working on the 2025 edition of my Christmas Book. It used to be faster to knock out simple arrangements in Encore but after correcting mistakes and exporting to Finale through PDFtoMusicPro — and then correcting That... just faster to do everything in Finale so now I do.

I’ve had Dorico for years but Finale is faster and I know how to keep it working for the next two years. MuseScore5 is two years late, I loathe Sibelius and Notion is now iPad/iOS only since Fender never updated the desktop app to full 64 bit support in the seven years they have owned it.