music notation software?

[jfrog]

Can anyone recommend good music notation software? (preferably cheap) I occasionally want to actually document music I've written.

Thanks in advance.

[Alden_Sloe]

My son uses Finale. He likes it pretty well. I find their licensing scheme to be somewhat onerous. I think they tie it to a MAC address or CPU serial number. Makes it really a bitch when you want to move it to a different machine or you have a harddisk failure.

He's looking now at buying the upgrade to the latest version of Finale (2007?) or possibly doing the "competivie upgrade" to Sibelius. Some of the features of Sibelius look pretty nice; scanning in sheet music or PDFs, better (claimed) MIDI support, virtual instrument plug-in support, etc. Don't know about their licensing scheme.

All of the notation software seems WAY expensive for what it does.

[TimOBrien]

Harmony Assistant ($80 - full page full-featured WYSIWYG editing)
Melody Assistant ($20 - single-line editing but full-page printing)

Tons of features, compares with the $500 programs.
They even have a $20 plugin that'll let you scan in printed sheet music to an editable file.
Works on Mac AND PC.

Demo on the website to try it out.

www.myriad-online.com

[bennychico11]

I started with Noteworthy Composer back in the day:
http://www.noteworthysoftware.com/

decent but I eventually moved up to Finale and like it better.

[Alden_Sloe]

Originally Posted by bennychico11

I started with Noteworthy Composer back in the day: ...decent but I eventually moved up to Finale and like it better.

So what makes Finale worth the bucks? The upgrade to stay current with the latest version is as much or more than some of these other offerings which promise free lifetime upgrades. No particular beef against Finale but reading the advertising blurbs (never to be believed) it's hard to understand what makes one a $500 program and the other a $50 program.

For $500 it ought to write hit songs for you

[andyhix]

http://www.power-tab.net/products.php

Very good for the price (free). It's a bit imperfect, but the imperfections are minor - the title on your pdf may run off the side of the page, etc. These things may even be fixed in the recent version; I haven't looked for an update in a long time.

Anyway, it's really quite versitile. It's designed for guitar (and bass, etc.) - don't know if it would work well for other instruments, but I would think so.

[jfrog]

thanks for the info.....

You've given me a direction to look at.

[IainDearg]

Another vote for Finale. Cool feature I use a lot is it's abitliy to drag and drop from the standard notation sfaff to a gutiar tab staff and - with a bit of editing, voila!

[jfrog]

Originally Posted by IainDearg

Another vote for Finale. Cool feature I use a lot is it's abitliy to drag and drop from the standard notation sfaff to a gutiar tab staff and - with a bit of editing, voila!

that sounds like a cool feature....which Finale are we talking about?....the expensive one? They have several different programs ranging from $44 up to Finale 2008, which looks like it's $600.

[jfrog]

it looks like you can do the tabs drag 'n drop with the cheap version (finale songwriter)

that may be the ticket.

[IainDearg]

Originally Posted by jfrog

that sounds like a cool feature....which Finale are we talking about?....the expensive one? They have several different programs ranging from $44 up to Finale 2008, which looks like it's $600.

I use Finale Guitar which is no longer available - however ...

http://www.finalemusic.com/songwriter/

is $49.95 and has "standard guitar and bass" tablature.

and...

http://www.finalemusic.com/allegro/

is $199 and has "user customizable" tablature.

Not sure what these differences are - drop them an email.

[jfrog]

I downloaded Finale's free "Notepad" & played around w/ it for a few minutes. It looks like it can do most of what I want, although it does lack some flexibility. I'll play around with it a little more at lunch. You can download 30 day demo's of their other programs it looks like. Maybe I'll do that instead.

[Toddskins]

I've owned Sibelius 1, and then v.2. I did not upgrade through the years (now Sibelius v.5) for one major reason.


While I liked Sibelius for some reasons, my personal need in editing music is not possible in Sibelius. That is, that when you edit music in Sibelius, such as entering a new note into an existing measure, all the other notes do NOT get pushed to the right into other measures, the way a Word Processor would behave.

Instead, all the notes in the existing measure get their time durations changed to make the whole measure add up to 1 whole value. I hate this!

So, I just got off the phone with Sibelius to see if they have added this "word processor" type ability with the new version 5 and was told "no, everything works on the timeline."

They will not get my upgrade business.


I then went over to Finale site to verify what I had heard years ago, and sure enough, in Finale, you have the option of moving all the notes to the right, further to the right and into new measures, when inserting a note. I will move over to Finale the next time I make a notation software purchase.


Why is this such an enormous issue?


Because as a synthesist, programmer, composer... using MIDI (which of us does not?), when you compose and play your music into a MIDI file and then bring that MIDI music into a notation package, you will want to edit it unto perfection. If the notes are not played perfectly, meaning the notes are a little early and late, then the notes can and will be in the wrong measure. So you'll want to clean it up.

This is why pushing notes to the side without changing their timing values is so critical.

In Sibelius, it will just arbitrarily change the values of your other notes to make it "fit". And then you don't have the same song you had initially. Impossible to work with in this manner.


I'm not too thrilled though with how complicated Finale appears. I was looking at all the menu commands and it seems overwhelming. Nevertheless, it has the feature I so desperately need.

[tojo]

there is a free version of finale called finale notepad.