Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections
Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections |
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| Introduction | Sustainability Factors | Content Categories | Format Descriptions | Contact | |
| Full name | Finale Legacy Music Notation File |
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| Description |
MUS is the legacy music notation format (which stores the visual representation of a musical score but no actual audio data) for the Finale software through version 2012. A note about terminology: Finale official documentation, including the Finale user guide (link via Internet Archive) refers to these files as "Finale Legacy Notation file" but other information sources, including PRONOM fmt/397 refers to them as "Enigma Binary File" due to embedded metadata in the header of the file in later versions. Earlier versions of the format do not include Enigma Binary File in the embedded metadata but instead, contain different versions of the word "Finale" as a file signifier. See PRONOM/fmt/1971 and PRONOM/fmt/1972 (and File Type Signifiers) for more details. Note: This resource adds the word "music" to the official Finale name to provide additional contextual information. After version 2012 and starting with version 2014, Finale switched to MUSX as the default format. Finale software sunset in August 2024. See History for more information. No formal documentation is available for the MUS file format but Tyler Thorsted in his Obsolete Thor blog entry on Finale formats explains that "the first version of Finale was developed for the Macintosh and didn’t have an extension. But by version 3.5 there was a comparable Windows version and the use of the extension .MUS. In order to share the files between the different platforms, Finale also created an ETF file, which instead of the binary MUS, the ETF is a plain text “transportable” file." See ETF for more information about the Enigma Transportable File format. |
| Production phase | Used during the creation process and as a middle state for sharing music among collaborators and colleagues that also use this software. |
| Relationship to other formats | |
| Has later version | MUSX, Finale Music Notation File (2014+) |
| Affinity to | ETF, Finale Enigma Transportable File. ETF transported Finale music notation documents between Windows and Mac |
| Affinity to | MusicXML_family, MusicXML File Format Family. MUS files can be exported to MusicXML files for improved interoperability. |
| LC experience or existing holdings | As of August 2024, the Library of Congress has less than 10,000 MUS files in its collections, primarily in the Music Division. |
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| LC preference | See the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement for format preferences for musical scores and musical notation. |
| Disclosure | Disclosure is very limited/poor. Comments welcome. |
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| Documentation |
No publicly available documentation of the MUS format exists. Comments welcome. |
| Adoption | MUS is a closed proprietary format which mainly relied on Finale to read and write. www.music-notation.info includes a list (last updated 2019) of applications import and export MUS files including Finale and allied products as well as SmartScore and some versions of Harmony Assistant. Practically, the common workflow is to export to another format, especially MusicXML. As explained in the Sibelius Help Center post File formats which Sibelius imports (also linked from File formats which Sibelius imports), Sibelius version 5: "For Finale 98/2000 files, Sibelius can directly open .mus files; For Finale 2001 or later, Sibelius can only open .etf files. For Finale 2004 or later, we recommend that you export a MusicXML file from Finale and import that into Sibelius." |
| Licensing and patents | This is a proprietary format specifically for Finale software which is owned by MakeMusic, formerly owned by Net4Music and first created by Coda Music Software. Patent information is unknown. Comments welcome. |
| Transparency | Requires Finale software to read and write. |
| Self-documentation |
Accessibility Features MUS files have no specific attributes to support accessibility. However, MUS can be exported to MusicXML which does have some capacity. See also Born-Accessible Music Publishing: Enabling the Creation of Accessible Digital Scores. Comments welcome. |
| External dependencies | MUS files can only be accessed, viewed or printed by Finale software but can be exported to MusicXML which is more interoperable. |
| Technical protection considerations | Unknown or unable to confirm due to limited documentation. Comments welcome. |
| Sound | |
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| Normal rendering | This format does not render sound. |
| Functionality beyond normal rendering | Does not render sound or audio bitstreams but instead stores the visual representation of a musical score. |
| Text | |
| Normal rendering | Although not strictly a format for textual content, formats for notated music can be text-based documents and share some functionality that are common with text. |
| Integrity of document structure | MUS can represent the semantic structure of a score: key; measures (bars); notes with pitch and duration; lyrics/words, etc. |
| Integrity of layout and display | MUS can represent layout semantics that are important to the display of scores, such as: whether directions should go above or below a staff; spacing for staves; and scaling of features relative to a single measure that can be adjusted to fit a particular pagesize. |
| Other | |
| Music Notation Components: Attributes (Staves, Clef, Time) | Unclear if supported because of lack of available documentation. Comments welcome. |
| Music Notation Components: Musical Directions | Unclear if supported because of lack of available documentation. Comments welcome. |
| Music Notation Components: Note Appearance (Tuplet, Stems, Beams, Accidentals, Notations) | Unclear if supported because of lack of available documentation. Comments welcome. |
| Music Notation Components: Multi-Part Music | Unclear if supported because of lack of available documentation. Comments welcome. |
| Tag | Value | Note |
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| Filename extension | mus |
Finale user guide (link via Internet Archive) as well as PRONOM fmt/1971 for Enigma Binary File (Finale) 1.. |
| Magic numbers | Hex: 46696E616C65(AA|28544D29)2031 ASCII: 'Finale' followed by either 'ª' or '™' and then the version number ' 1' |
See https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/1971 for Enigma Binary File (Finale) 1. |
| Magic numbers | Hex: 46696E616C6528544D292032 ASCII: 'Finale(TM) 2' |
See https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/1972 for Enigma Binary File (Finale) 2. |
| Magic numbers | Hex: 454E49474D412042494E4152592046494C45 ASCII: 'Enigma Binary File'; Version info can be found within the file but this is a generic signature to cover all versions from 3 onwards. |
See https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/397 for Enigma Binary File (Finale) 3+. |
| Other | See note. | NARA File Format Preservation Plan ID has no corresponding entry as of September 2024. |
| Pronom PUID | fmt/1971 |
See https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/1971 for Enigma Binary File (Finale) 1. |
| Pronom PUID | fmt/1972 |
See https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/1972 for Enigma Binary File (Finale) 2. |
| Pronom PUID | fmt/397 |
See https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/397 for Enigma Binary File (Finale) 3+. |
| Wikidata Title ID | Q125947103 |
See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q125947103 for Enigma Binary File Format Family. |
| Wikidata Title ID | Q125937611 |
See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q125937611 for Enigma Binary File 1. |
| Wikidata Title ID | Q125938431 |
See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q125938431 for Enigma Binary File 2. |
| Wikidata Title ID | Q58526504 |
See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58526504 for Enigma Binary File 3+. |
| General | The Macintosh Repository has many legacy Finale versions for Mac available for download, including Finale 1.0 from 1987. |
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| History |
Finale was originally written by Coda Music Technology, owned for a time by Net4Music, and later owned by MakeMusic. In the blog post The end of Finale (link via Internet Archive) posted on August 26th, 2024, MakeMusic announced that it was ending development for Finale software and ending technical support in 2025. Greg Dell'Era states that "four decades is a very long time in the software industry. Technology stacks change, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale’s millions of lines of code add up. This has made the delivery of incremental value for our customers exponentially harder over time. Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry—a reality after 35 years, and I want to be candid about this. 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." MakeMusic points Finale users to the Dorico software, developed by Steinberg, the creators of Cubase and a subsidiary of Yamaha. However, Dorico cannot directly import Finale .mus or .musx files so these files will need to be exported to MusicXML to work with Dorico products. |
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