Can anyone recommend a program for straightforward composition? I’d like to notate some tunes I know, and fancy something a bit more readable than pencilled scribbles on paper
I like NoteWorthy Composer pretty well. It’s a good bang for the buck. You can download a trial version from their website.
Cheers,
David
Finale NotePad is to music notation what Windows NotePad is to word processing. Which is to say, it doesn’t do much, but it’s very straight forward (especially for whistle tunes) and it’s free.
http://www.codamusic.com/coda/
bye
Bill
Melody](http://www.myriad-online.com/enindex.htm%3EMelody) Assitant is my favorite notation software. It has very robust features and very inexpensive. Myriad (makers of MA) are also very good about upgrades and enhancements. At $15.00 its a steal.
You might want to search the board for notation software, several folks have published reviews and the subject comes up often.
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Enjoy Your Music,
Lee Marsh
[ This Message was edited by: LeeMarsh on 2002-02-26 14:31 ]
I’m also a Noteworthy Composer user, and very happy with it. The music fonts are of very high quality, so that the printed music is quite legible. There are features which allow quite sophisticated musical constructions, and such common ornaments as slurs and grace notes are easy. It also allows one to make a midi file of the music, and, conversly, can take a midi file and make sheet music back out of it. Updates to the program are free, so long as you have already purchased the relevant major version number.
The last time I checked, it sold for about $45.00. It’s well worth it, in my humble opinion.
Like Lee Marsh, I also use Melody Assistant and haven’t found anything I can’t do with it! I use it for whistle tunes as well as full Jazz piano arrangements. For the latter, it even lets me write the names of the chord changes and paste them above the staff. It’s probably the best $15.00 I ever spent in my life!
Edit: Now I need a spell checker that knows when I write past I really mean paste!
[ This Message was edited by: Tom_Gaul on 2002-02-26 19:16 ]
I am looking for a piece of software that will do the following:
I want to take a piece of written sheet music, scan it, and have the computer play the song in some audio format. Is there anything that will do this?
I have lots of written music and can’t read a note…
Musical OCR ??
http://www.npcimaging.com/
http://www.visiv.co.uk/
http://web3.humboldt1.com/~jiva/ocr/_ocr_resource.htm
http://www.threeleaf.com/pages/products/music/music-ocr-reviews.htm
http://www.neuratron.com/
http://www.balnakeil.demon.co.uk/
http://www.acornusers.org/ans/arcmag/sharpeye.php
http://www.musica.at/shareware/Notation/more2.html
How’s that for service…
Beth, you really should learn to read music.
Tony, I know, I know…I can read it, but only if you want one note per five seconds! hehehe
Thanks for the links!
On 2002-02-26 20:38, avanutria wrote:
Tony, I know, I know…I can read it, but only if you want one note per five seconds! heheheThanks for the links!
Ohhhhhh… so you like playing Airs ?
this is how I started, seven years ago…and you could hear me whispering “every good boy does..a-hah!” between each note 
On 2002-02-26 20:38, avanutria wrote:
Tony, I know, I know…I can read it, but only if you want one note per five seconds! heheheThanks for the links!
Heheh…actually I do, it gives me time to think about what I’m doing! I only know one so far though - Down By the Sally Gardens…and I don’t really like it…hehehe
I can only learn them if I hear them, you see, and no one seems to play them. That one was on a CD.
Sally’s one of my favorites…
There are a few versions of it going around. I like Mick O’Brien’s version best.
Finale 2000 is a great program. Unfortunately it is rather expensive, however, I have ‘heard’ that it is easy to burn a copy of, if one was so inclined. The great thing about this and other similar programs is that you can hook up a midi controller, play some music, and it writes is all out for you. Rather handy.
Finale 2001(2002?) isn’t as expensive as it used to be (I got it on a discount at around $700)…but it’s still up in the $500 range I believe. For what these folks are looking for, I’d suggest looking at some of the other less-wallet-reaming alternatives listed here first and see if they suffice.
I only chose Finale myself finally after running through about $250 in music notation software, and not finding the exact blend of ingredients I needed for my website.
Greg
Another vote for Finale Note Pad. If you like it (it’s free) you can upgrade to a fancy paid version later, with no problem.
Thanks for the linl to Melody Assistant Lee!
From what I read it sounds like a great program for the money!
Wow! Thanks people!
Another approach to notating tunes would be to use abc format:
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/
While not at all the same sort of thing as the more robust programs mentioned already in the thread, the abc notation language has the virtue of producing tiny files which are cross-platform and cross-app (more or less) and which can be converted to dots and played over your computer’s speakers by a large number of freeware and shareware programs. Mac users have the blessing of a particularly excellent player/dot-displayer, BarFly.
A bonus feature is that there are an enormous number of tunes already available in abc format, not that that’s relevant to your expressed need.
And I should add that tunes written in abc can be played on everything from $1.99 pink plastic fifes to engraved sterling silver Copelands!
John
Finale Notepad cannot read ABC tunes, which to my mind is a huge drawback for Irish tunes. For that reason, I use “MusicEase”.
– Scott Turner