Any good notation software?

[kalospiano]

Hello hello, could anybody suggest any good freeware program to write down music scores on the computer?

I have Noteworthy Composer but it's only a demo. I've also tried Muse Score but it didn't seem to have the same immediate ease of use.

Thanks a bunch to whoever will suggest any free alternatives!

[brogers70]

Musescore is the only one I've used. It's not terrific at writing down complex piano parts, but for the most part, after a bit of messing around with it, I've found it very useful. I think it mostly becomes a nuisance if you have multiple lines or voices in one hand on the piano moving in different rhythms; in cases like that it is sometimes a bit of  battle to get the score to look exactly as you'd like it to - you may have to go in and change the properties of stems and flags manually to get it to look normal.

[visitor]

https://www.finalemusic.com/products/notepad/

[kalospiano]

Thank you both!

[timothy42b]

I have Noteworthy, Musescore, and Finale Notepad.

There are some limitations in all of them.  Musescore is nonintuitive for me; I suspect to avoid copyright or patent issues they deliberately used non standard approaches for some operations, and I just can't get past that. Fixing mistakes is hard.  Finale Notepad can't change keys or clefs in the middle of a piece, and I routinely need that.  Noteworthy does almost everything I need, but it can be a struggle when you have contrasting rhythms in different parts on the same staff. 

Then there's Lilypond, which my brother uses.  But it's text based, not WYSIWYG.  He gets perfect results but he's a computer programmer. 

In the end I paid for the full version of Noteworthy.  I really should upgrade to a more recent release, they've probably fixed what I had trouble with.  The original demo version of Noteworthy could do everything but unlimited Save, but there was a workaround.  You could Save to MIDI.  I just looked at the website and it looks like they've plugged that loophole.