scoring software

[jeffkonkol]

looking for general opinions and knowledge on the various scoring suites out there....

what does everyone use, and what features are commonplace?

are folks generally using a midi interface and playing their piece into the software, or have folks leaned more heavily towards easy and intuitive interfaces that simply aid manually scoring pieces?

We seem to have an active composition thread, so I figured this would be a good time to explore this tangent....

[zezhyrule]

Finale Notepad 2012 is now free. That's the first thing I'd recommend for anyone :3

[quantum]

Finale and Sibelius are the big ones.  Many professionals will choose one or the other.  It all depends on your working style.  Advantage is there is a large community of users available to help use the program, and with whom you can share the files.  These programs are very powerful and will allow you to do uncommon things to the score, such as utilized in early music and avant garde scores.  Unfortunately with this, comes a high price.  Both programs have lesser featured versions at a lower price point.  If you are a student or church musician, you can get a significant discount.  

On the open source scene you have:

MuseScore, a GUI notation program.  I'm watching this closely, as it would be wonderful to have an open source program that competes at the level of Finale and Sibelius.

LilyPond - focuses on the typographical quality of the engraving.  It uses text based entry.  Think of how HTML becomes a graphical web page.  Apparently it has a very steep learning curve, but most likely very well worth the effort.  

***

Personally, when I made a decision over 10 years ago, I went with Finale and have stuck with it ever since.  At the time it seemed much more attractive than Sibelius, especially with regard to the efficiency of note entry.  Many of my colleagues also use Finale, so it is easy to share files with them.

I'm very much intrigued with LilyPond, but do not have the time to commit to learning it at the moment.  

[lovevision]

[jeffkonkol]

ordered a copy of notation musician and a midi to usb cable for a grand total of 30 bucks.  In theory it is supposed to be rather good at translating played parts into a score..... I suspect it wont work, but I will report back regardless.

[timothy42b]

In theory it is supposed to be rather good at translating played parts into a score.....

Make sure you turn quantize on, else you'll spend all your time correcting the rhythms you thought you played.

I don't attempt keyboard entry, I'm faster with the arrow keys, hot keys, and enter.  Throw your mouse away. 

I use Noteworthy Composer which is free, stable, and full featured.  (I paid for the upgrade, I use it so much.) 

[ajspiano]

I feel that if I were to use a DP for score entry I would need it to be a step input not a real time input.. ..I'd end up with so much mess, even with quantize I get mountains of problems. - maybe I just have bad timing..

[jeffkonkol]

i used quantize back in the day with sequencers.... but im generally not a fan.  I will play around with it and see, though it may only be viable in step time.

the other thought I had is record it in cubase or protools and see if i can import it from there as a midi file and see if it transcribes more cleanly.

but ill go with occams razor and start on the simple side ... back the tempo down to a crawl and see if it can track the rhythms

wont know for awhile... synths at the guitarist's whose out of town for easter... the life of an electronic musician

[timothy42b]

I've used Anvil and quantize for direct keyboard entry but never had much luck.  I'm just not a good enough player, I guess.

I've also used my notation program and the keyboard.  My left hand hits the computer for note value (3 is quarter note, 4 is eighth note) while my right hand hits the keyboard for the note (C, D, etc.)  Some people really like this but for me it's faster to just use the computer keyboard and arrow up and and down.