I’ve got some exciting news to share this week.

First off, Finale SongWriter is now shipping. At $49.95 SongWriter is an affordable way for your Finale NotePad-using friends to add some of the features they’ve most requested. Check out the new website.

That’s not all we’ve been up to. We’ve also announced that:

• Our iPad viewer will arrive in May. Check out the latest video of this work-in-process in this recent blog post. Did I mention the app will be free?
• Finale 2012b will arrive in June, will be “broader in scope than past updates,” and will “include further improvements to features added in 2012, address top customer requests, and provide new features to help users create digital sheet music.” Finale 2012b will, of course, be free of charge to all owners of Finale 2012.
• We’ve also entered into an agreement with Hal Leonard to “dramatically expand [our] SmartMusic music library to include many of the most popular songs of the 20th century and today’s contemporary hits. For the first time ever, those songs will be available for purchase from within the SmartMusic application.”

Finally, Finale product specialist, frequent Finale blogger, and my friend Tom Johnson celebrates his twenty-fifth year with our company this month. I suspect that such a long run is pretty rare in the field of music software (It probably helps that he started when he was a long-haired, teenaged, hippie rock star).

While I hope to feature Tom in more detail soon, please join me in congratulating him!