Free Music Notation Software

pete

pete

Brassica Oleracea
Staff member
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Just a quickie post. Busy.

In my professional career, I used Finale, MotU Performer and MotU Composer. Finale, being a $900 product when I used it (it's a tad under $500, now) had the best features, printout and MIDI playback.

A couple years back, I stumbled onto Finale's freeware called Allegro. They discontinued that as a free product and started charging for it.

Today, I stumbled onto http://musescore.org. It's a free open-source "alternative" to Finale and Sibelius. It does look very simular to Finale. It's also a fairly actively supported product.

Enjoy!
 
+1. I use it for quick and dirty stuff, like for "play this %ç*^$! passage for me, please".
For more elaborate stuff, I still use LilyPond, however Musescore is a strong competitor, especially for accidental users.
 
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On a slightly related note - I have a bunch of old Encore files - circa 2002 or so. I've never been able to open them in Sibelius, and a friend was unable to open them in Finale. Does anyone know a way to open / convert these? I'd settle for a midi conversion.
 
saxhound said:
On a slightly related note - I have a bunch of old Encore files - circa 2002 or so. I've never been able to open them in Sibelius, and a friend was unable to open them in Finale. Does anyone know a way to open / convert these? I'd settle for a midi conversion.
Click to expand...
http://www.gvox.com/encore.php. You could at least try the trial to see if the newest version can open the old files.
 
tictactux said:
+1. I use it for quick and dirty stuff, like for "play this %ç*^$! passage for me, please".
For more elaborate stuff, I still use LilyPond, however Musescore is a strong competitor, especially for accidental users.
Click to expand...
One of the main reasons I got into using Finale -- I started with version 1.0 -- was because it had, quite literally, the best output of any music software. Hey, I've seen some output from modern apps that don't look half as good as Finale output did on an Imagewriter II back in 1986.

Lilypond has some beautiful output. However, it doesn't seem to have that user friendly of an input interface.

You can't have everything. Hey, where would you put it?
 
pete said:
http://www.gvox.com/encore.php. You could at least try the trial to see if the newest version can open the old files.
Click to expand...

I did look at that site. I was actually hoping for an inexpensive (read free) conversion solution. I have all these files, but no idea if the arrangements are any good.

I've been a Sibelius user since 1.0 (currently at 5.25). Nice program, but one of my quibbles with it is the amount of formatting you have to do to get decent looking parts. Things like glisses, chord symbols, hairpins and the various texts don't play nice together. Supposedly v6 has fixed a lot of this with something called Magnetic Layout. I'll probably wait for v7.
 
I got onto the Finale bandwagon by purchasing a very old copy at the distressed goods sale held up at Brook-Mays warehouse up in Chicago. Once I had that in hand (with the warrantee card), I filed the warrantee card, waited a couple of weeks, and then paid the $150 upgrade fee to move to the modern version of the program.

I use it now and then, but for "quick and dirty", pen and staff paper works better (if somewhat more sloppy in the final output. But, for turning out a quality, engraved looking, final product, it can't be beat.
 
"Professional Composer" was about the first commercial music notation program available on Mac, I believe manufactured by MOTU (Mark Of The Unicorn) in the 1980's. I don't remember it being updated since about 1995. If that's true there's little hope of getting it to work anywhere outside a computer museum.
 
Yup. I still have (kept as a souvenir) my Professional Composer, musical keypad, an add-on to the program that made it workable for me, one who has problems using a regular keyboard or numeric pad for anything other than its designed purpose. For the time and place, it was an innovative piece of equipment, one that allowed me to throw together some nice transpositions of difficult pieces.

(I wished that I still had it when I had to play Chadwick's Jubilee (I think that was the proper name), which was pitched in A and written in the bass clef, but is almost universally performed on a Bb bass clarinet by a player accustomed to playing from treble clef notation. One or the other of the transpositions involved I could have handled, but not both. With Finale, putting it all together took me forever, hunting and pecking on the computer keyboard. With Professional Composer and the keypad, it would have been a doddle.)

Professional Composer was way ahead of its time, both as a program and in the innovative means of input that they designed to go with it. Putting together a complicated computer program, as hard as it is to do so, is a walk in the park compared to designing and producing a custom piece of hardware like that keypad. (Hell, computer software, by abandoning written documentation these days, has become almost simple to produce.)

Just the financial investment necessary to create the keypad is an accomplishment far above that done for most computer items. Nowadays, it would be in the second tier, but in its day it was really something.

However, it was such a specialized piece of software that it got little notice outside of the computer nerd music community. And, that is a three part Venn diagram with very little overlap whatsoever.

While I still have the keypad (buried deep in storage), and the computer on which I ran it (ditto), I no longer have the software (I think - with hard drives it's hard to be sure, and I've not fired up that old hard drive in over fifteen years), nor the dot matrix printer (Apple's Extended Imagewriter, a cumbersome piece of equipment that I regretted buying as soon as I made the purchase) that I used to print out the charts. Time marches on...
 
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