Last month, nothing short of an earthquake-level upheaval struck the professional music industry. On Aug. 26, the president of the Colorado-based tech company MakeMusic announced that the firm would be making “no further updates” to Finale, the pioneering and popular music-notation app that the firm had been selling and updating for 35 years. “Technology stacks change, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale’s millions of lines of code add up,” MakeMusic’s Greg Dell’Era wrote in his first (and likely last) contribution to the company’s Finale-centric blog. “Instead of releasing new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we’ve made the decision to end its development.”

In other words: A key computer program for digitizing and expediting the arduous process of writing and formatting the types of sheet music used by musicians and ensembles everywhere—orchestras, schoolkids, the theater world, session instrumentalists, pop producers—would be phased out by the following year, with no hopes for revival. However, Finale subscribers would be offered an “exclusive” discount to switch over to a newer tool called Dorico, which is owned by a subsidiary of the historic instrument manufacturer Yamaha.

This dry, corporatese update provoked a stronger reaction than Dell’Era must have anticipated. The German electronic artist and blogger Peter Kirn deemed it “the end of an era.” The famed film and theater composer Marc Shaiman (When Harry Met Sally…, Hairspray) expressed his indignation on Instagram, in a post that attracted similarly outraged comments from prominent performers like Tony DeSare and Joan Ellison. Finale’s own Instagram post regarding the impending discontinuation garnered hundreds of aggrieved comments from conductors, songwriters, music students, academics, and general enthusiasts calling the move an “utter betrayal” that was “ridiculous” and “absolutely unacceptable.” They cited the steep costs, learning curves, and disruption of personal files that would result from the imperative to adopt a different software.

If you’re unfamiliar with Finale, you may have trouble understanding why a program for placing musical notes on staffs has enflamed such passions. The most succinct way to explain its significance may come from David Pogue, the CBS Sunday Morning correspondent and former Broadway producer, who claims he wouldn’t be where he is today without the program. “Finale is as close to being the Microsoft Word of sheet music as there is,” said Pogue. “If you were working with an arranger or a conductor, you would just be able to say, ‘I’ll give you the Finale files,’ and you’d know that they’d be able to open it.”

Pogue is intimately familiar with Finale, having written the first instruction manuals for the software back in the 1990s. The software itself emerged during the computer boom of the late ’80s, when a religious composer named Phil Farrand—who declined to speak with me for this piece—sought a means of music transcription and editing to hasten a tedious task that, at the time, could really be done only by hand and on paper. (Other, more basic music apps available on the Macintosh, like Professional Composer and Deluxe Music Construction Set, suffered frequent glitches, rendering them insufficient for most budding creatives.) So Farrand teamed up with John Borowicz from Coda Music Management—the company now known as MakeMusic—to develop and publish Finale in 1988, pushing to market a much more complex, expensive product whose abilities far exceeded its competitors’: allowing users to write arrangements with dozens of instruments, hear live audio playback of their creations, and access a wide-spanning range of musical symbols (including for dynamics and rests).

Powerful as Finale was, it did lack one feature key to its rivals’ appeal: ease of use. “Finale was staggeringly complex. It came with hundreds of pages of manuals filled with bizarre jargon that no musician would be able to understand,” said Pogue, who reviewed an early version of the app in the Mac Street Journal, a New York–based newsletter for Apple enthusiasts. “It had to be complicated, because it did 100 more things than any preceding program.” Pogue started assisting other Finale users in New York as a salesman at the legendary Sam Ash music store (which closed just earlier this year) and submitted a proposal to Coda for simplifying Finale and its manuals. The company accepted, and Pogue helped craft both the second version of Finale (“my writing to this day is part of the Help system”) and its accompanying three-volume manual, making for a much more legible, accessible system overall.

It was this iteration of Finale, easier to understand but no less competent, that the Grammy-nominated big-band composer Darcy James Argue stumbled across in the mid-1990s as a music student at McGill University. “For every arrangement and composition that I’ve ever written since then, I have used Finale to produce it,” said Argue. “It’s like playing an instrument. It’s really part of my workflow, my muscle memory.” Around the same time, British coders and composers began using a rival notation platform called Sibelius (named for the late-Romantic-era Finnish composer Jean Sibelius), which wouldn’t appear on American computers till the late ’90s. Both became industry standards for digital music notation throughout the 2000s, launching regular updates and holding a sort of “duopoly” over the space, as Dorico’s product marketing manager, Daniel Spreadbury, characterized it to me.

Things changed by the following decade. A private-equity firm bought Finale’s parent company in 2013, a moment Spreadbury pinpointed as an “inflection point” for MakeMusic’s business model—one far more focused on its cloud services than on prioritizing an already-aging service like Finale. Around the same time, Sibelius’ parent company shut down the platform’s London studio and laid off its original developers, replacing them with newer recruits. By that time, other notation apps—such as the free, open-source MuseScore program—began making inroads into the market, throwing the Finale–Sibelius dynamic off course and allowing many of Sibelius’ now-fired devs (including Spreadbury) to develop their own alternative: Dorico, the signature music-notation app from the German music-tech outfit Steinberg.

In the face of more, newer, and cheaper options, Finale couldn’t retain its singular hold over the music-notation space. However, it did retain a loyal base of “power users,” Argue told me, who appreciated the platform’s openness to user-coded third-party additions. “There’s not quite that same DIY community around Dorico or Sibelius,” he said. “I designed the jazz-font default that’s included in the latest version of Finale, and I included compatibility for the music-symbol fonts from Standard Music Font Layout.” (Which, incidentally, was originally created by Spreadbury for use in Dorico.) Finale was also buoyed by its position as a market pioneer and early default for various musical institutions, regarding everything from the know-how down to the file formats. “Finale was very widely used in colleges and universities in the U.S.,” said Spreadbury, while Argue added, “Practically every Broadway show since about 1994 has been prepared in Finale, along with a huge number of film scores.”

So why axe Finale now, especially if there are so many famous works out there whose digital iterations are best suited for, well, Finale? The business troubles Finale faced in its private-equity era were no doubt part of it. But there’s also the fact that it is a nearly 40-year-old piece of software that, Pogue said, “became what they call spaghetti code”—that is, a convoluted, poorly structured skeleton that’s been changed many times over many years by many people. “It would certainly be possible to rip out the engine and replace it with a new one. It would just be really expensive and time-consuming.”

Finale has long been in a unique position, having reached the public at an ideal time (during the mass adoption of desktop computers, and right after more-primitive music apps had been tried and tested) and having held its own through decades of upstart competitors that were able to more easily tailor their functions to less-bulky hardware. “Each program is a product of the decades that we’ve lived in, and it’s difficult for a product to move far outside of that,” said Spreadbury. “Finale was mouse-driven. Sibelius had a big window that floated on your screen and was controlled by your keyboard. Dorico was designed for use on a laptop.”

So, what to do if you’re a Finale die-hard or if you’d like to figure out a workable switch as quickly as possible? The good news is that MakeMusic seems to have been sensitive to the outrage and has been gradually tweaking things to make the transition from Finale easier. Just one day after its initial announcement, Greg Dell’Era clarified, in response to “feedback,” that several Finale functions would remain operational through the following year, that the latest version of Finale would be included with a Dorico purchase, and that users will have free access to resources to help them adjust to Dorico, including onboarding videos, a lengthy FAQ, and a nearly two-hour-long webinar that Dorico livestreamed just last week. The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers also held a webinar on “Finale’s Finale,” enlisting veteran notation experts from different genres (Broadway, Nashville, jazz) to help address questions and concerns about the change.

To avoid a wipeout in Finale usability that may result from future Windows and Mac software updates, Argue recommends “holding on to an older computer and an older OS” as a sort of “forever Finale computer—the cheapest Mac Mini I could find, keeping that around and hoping that the hard drive doesn’t fail and the processor continues to run.” All of my interviewees, too, recommended converting your music-file formats through MusicXML, either turning them into files that can work with other tools or exporting them as PDFs so there’s a permanent record of your music. Pogue and Argue also independently expressed their approval of Dorico and how it’s handling the Finale transition. “Dorico’s not totally perfect if you have super weird stuff like harp notation or complicated percussion staves. You might have to hand-tweak those after they’re in the new system,” said Pogue. “But straightforward stuff like vocal choirs and orchestras—those will come in cleanly.”

Of course, Pogue added sadly, there will inevitably be a mass cultural loss of the type that affects any older piece of creative software: “I have hundreds upon hundreds of Finale files for all the songs I’ve written, all the arrangements I’ve done, all the shows I’ve worked on. I can still open them, and I will for years, but there is going to come a point when they are no longer openable.”