Mike Halloran

The manual shows how to do this. If you still need help, please let us know if Mac or Windows, the OS version and build of Encore.

Since Finale announced end of life last year, there are only two products that qualify as “Top Notation Software” with all the features and functionality that the large publishing houses require. Those are Sibelius and Dorico with the promise that MuseScore will join the list — MS5 will prove or disprove that.

There are a small number of midlevel products including Overture but they lack the engraving features that the big houses need. Then there’s text based Lilypond for the hobbyists that consider 19th C. engraving to be the pinnacle of notation and have no use for MusicXML and so on…

Encore has never made that list as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, the printouts of both 4.5.5 and 5.0.7 look amateurish and I’m being kind. Fine for internal use and rehearsals but never for publication. Slurs are abysmal.

Encore’s strength has always been its simplicity, speed and ease of use which is why it sits on my laptop and I still use it. Nothing else can touch it for that. If it also looked good, would meet 90% of my needs. As is, I always need to convert to Finale for distribution or publication.

Don has told me that the next version will look good enough with tapered slurs and everything. If it also keeps the full ease of use of Encore 5… Ok, I’m not really expecting that but if it retains most of the features I’ve enjoyed, it will be a winner for me.

What I consider “heavy lifting” — large, complex scores and the like — will still require one of the Big Two or Three or I might keep Finale going since it’s the devil I know best but that’s quite alright with me.

…the bar should automatically recognize the anacrusis value without the user specifying it

Hmmm… Interesting and now that you bring it up, even desirable. Seeing that no notation app has this functionality currently, we may have to wait for the promised AI features of MuseScore 5 to show us all how this should be done.

I confess that Encore 5’s ability to specify anacrusis without jumping through a number of hoops is one of my favorite features (ahem, MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius…). I haven’t played with Dorico 6 yet to see if there’s any improvement from Yamaha/Steinberg but none has been announced.

There is no way to purchase Encore 5 at this time.

I was given a 2011 Mac in pristine condition which has OS High Sierra 10.13.6. I would like to dedicate this unit to Encore and remove Encore from my Mac Mini which is running the same OS.

Encore doesn’t run very well over High Sierra and a 2011 Mac cannot run Mojave. There are workarounds for most of the issues but it’s frustrating when you can’t see measure endings and other problems.

You really want a Mac model made 2012–2018. These run Mojave.

Note: I have kept this OS on the Mac Mini strictly to be able to access and print items in Encore. Once Encore is removed from this machine, I will upgrade to Sonoma 14.6.1 which is the OS on two other Macs in my office.

As my friends who control satellites say, “That is a non-problem.” Install Sonoma on a new APFS Volume. Update your High Sierra Volume to Mojave (download the installer from Apple). It’s ridiculously easy. Here’s the Apple Support doc on this. Hold the Option key when starting to change between the volumes—to reboot into the same Volume, select it as the Startup Disk.

Add, delete, or erase APFS volumes in Disk Utility on Mac

Do not Partition your drive; create Volumes instead as needed.

• This reply was modified 4 weeks ago by Mike Halloran.

The 4.5.5 updater should be fine if already installed. Both Andre and I have the complete installers for Windows and Mac but the OP never answered the question: Windows or Mac?

Mike, or anyone, do you know any details about how the Music XML backward compatibility works here? For example, if an application exports Music XML 4.0 but the other application that imports it only supports 3.x, will the 4.0 file be imported correctly as far as it goes?

The way it works with most apps is that a .musicxml 3.1 or 4.0 file can be imported but any new/incompatible features are ignored (or have weird results). Some apps will pop up a slew of error messages in the process but you just click through and ignore them. The .musicxml extension was new to 3.1.

Since I have Overture 5 and Finale 27 as well as Encore 5.0.7 on my laptops, I could always export a 4.0 file from Finale and import it into the other two to see what happens. I do this now and then with both Dorico and MuseScore to look at their progress on MusicXML.

Finale lets you select the level of .xml, .mxl (compressed) or .musicxml (3.1 and 4.0) version you want to export. When I don’t know what’s on the receiving end, I select .xml 3.0 in my Finale export preferences.