music notation software

BHead

New member
As a songwriter myself, I did experiment a couple music notation software but found none worked ... either too expensive or too short of features. (I know Finale 2000 is great, but it costs a lot)

I'm so thankful to come across the NoteWorthy software which I think is of the best value. It cost me less than $40 and the sofeware never crashed and uses only about 2 meg of my computer's storage.

The only shortcoming, at least for me, is the letter chord editing. It really doesn't have a feature called "Chord edit"; instead I use the insert text function to insert letter chords on top of the scores. Now when you have basic chords like C, D, F, G, ... you will print a perfectly fine score that no one can tell it's from a sofeware that cost $40. But when you try some B-flat, E-flat, F-sharp, ... chords, you'll find it very annoying. You can never present a sheet music with Bb. Right? It doesn't really come with a "flat" symbol and super/sub-script feature.

Also, I want something that automatically changes the letter chords when the key is changed.

Friends, I'm a total newbie in this forum. If I did get to the wrong forum, please kindly let me know ... otherwise, please share your experience with using music notation software. :)

Thanks!
 
I have some experience with two, although I am not sure if either automatically changes chord symbols. I bought Personal Composer years ago (I have an affinity for independent companies). While I like the program it has a few bugs. It seems to stop working at times (I will do something like resize a measure and the program won't do it... while it lets me do other things like move notes) until I reboot the computer... then it runs fine. The trait which caused me to look elsewhere for notation is that there are constraints on what you can put where.... I rarely write music out on the program. I have my midi song and then read the file and want to clean it up and print it out. What I noticed was that in Personal composer, if some of the notes were not quantized properly, it wouldn't let me add or change certain things in a measure. (A measure in 4/4 time shows three quarter notes and a rest... I want to change the rest to another quarter note and PC warns me that I do not have enough room in the measure --after I deleted the rest-- to put in a quarter note?? EXCUSE ME!!!!!) Never quite figured that out, but I eventually got so frustrated that I...

Purchased Overture 2 from Cakewalk because it was on sale for $99. Apparently Cakewalk is not going to continue to support it (will not offer Win 2000 drivers and says it will not work under 2000). Anyway, it seems to do what I want to, so far, but I am on a newsgroup that talks about it and most of the guys there really complain about Overture and say they are going to Finale.

Good luck!!
 
I've used Noteworthy and Finale and Finale is by far the superior piece of software. There's a stripped-down version, Finale Allegro, which might be adequate to your needs (I have the full version largely because every so often I end up having to do some serious scoring--orchestral type stuff--which Allegro won't do). For the really cheap, there's a free program, Finale Notepad, which is crap for entry, but not too bad otherwise.

I will say that Noteworthy's QWERTY input is the best I've used, and one option would be to do note entry in Noteworthy, save as MIDI, import into Notepad, then enter chords/lyrics/etc at that point.

-dh
 
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