Log inSign upIn August 2024, MakeMusic announced that Finale — the notation software many musicians and educators had used for decades — was being discontinued, with no further development and users advised to migrate their work elsewhere. That left a lot of composers, arrangers, and band and choir directors with a library of scores and no clear next step. If you're one of them, StaffWeaver is a browser-based notation editor built around the things displaced users have said they need most: visual drag-and-drop entry, a working MusicXML import, and no installer standing between you and your next score.
We're not trying to be Finale, and this page isn't affiliated with or endorsed by MakeMusic — it's here because switching software mid-career is disruptive, and we'd rather make the honest case for where StaffWeaver fits than leave you guessing.
Built and live: drag a note value from the palette onto the staff and it snaps to the nearest pitch and beat, keeping the measure musically valid as you go. No text-entry shortcuts to memorize before you can write a single bar.
StaffWeaver runs entirely in the browser — laptop, tablet, or phone — with a touch-first editor built for fingers as well as a mouse. No installer, no license file tied to one machine, no plugin to keep updated.
Upload a .xml, .musicxml, or .mxl file straight from your dashboard. It is free, runs entirely in your browser (nothing is sent to a server just to parse the file), and it honestly flags anything it had to simplify along the way — no silently dropped key or time changes.
Scan-to-edit is live: upload a PDF or a photo of printed sheet music and StaffWeaver's ingestion pipeline recognizes the notes and rhythms and hands you back an editable score, so the scores that only ever existed on paper don't get left behind.
Every score is saved to your account in the cloud, not to a folder on your hard drive — open the same library from any browser you sign into, on any computer.
A free tier to start, then a flat $49 per seat per year for Premium, with pay-as-you-go credit tiers for scanning starting at $4.99 a month. The full price list is on our pricing page — no quote request, no sales call required.
We'd rather tell you where StaffWeaver falls short than have you find out the hard way.
Finale, Dorico, and Sibelius have decades of engraving refinement — cross-staff notation, complex tuplet nesting, publisher-grade spacing rules. StaffWeaver handles everyday notation well; it is not trying to replace a professional engraver's toolkit yet.
There's no audio playback today. It's on our roadmap, not shipped — we'd rather say that plainly than pretend a silent editor plays sound.
StaffWeaver reads MusicXML, not Finale's native file formats. See the FAQ below for the export path while your Finale license still runs.
Export MusicXML from Finale while it still runs, upload it here, and pick up where you left off — free to start, no credit card required.
Finale is a product of MakeMusic, Inc. StaffWeaver is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by MakeMusic.