Other notation programmes

[Kevin]

I started with Composers Pen, a programme for the Amstrad. It did not play back, just printed out. Then I went onto Personnal Composer that just had a basic midi playback.

What have you used?

[davidmonks]

I started out with a public domain programme called Noteworthy. Compared to what it became, it was very primitive to start with. However it developed and eventually, I believe, developed a play-back feature. I still have stuff I pronted with it. Fond memories.

[deepdrummer]

I used Melody assistant for a while (bought it). Good value for the money. I then tried every demo I could find and landed on SIbelius as the program of choice. In the beginning I regretted buying Sibelius over Finale due to the ease of making drum parts in Finale and better drum sounds but with the add in, rock and pop sounds, Sibelius won me over in the long run. I often recommend people try finale notepad first since it is still free to try. I have no regrets at all on choosing Sibelius. I should order version 7 later this week.

[Kevin]

Keep us posted as to how you get on with the program. There are updates to it already so they are ironing out some of the bugs.

[Joseph]

Wow, a memory jogger! My very first notation program was Passport Designs initial program, PolyWriter, written for the Apple II+ platform (also had some of their early sequencing applications). I moved on through several versions of Personal Composer and had a nice relationship with the staff as an "unofficial" beta tester. The original creator's dad was trying to get the company rolling (it was still available and updated the last time I went searching). Then things started to pick up a bit with a switch to Encore (also Passport's and also still in the running - my older brother uses it to this day). When the opportunity came to switch to Sibelius I made the change. I have no major complaints with the software but I am concerned as to where AVID will take it. I guess Finale could be in my future. It's all up to AVID.

Joseph

[juan]

My first was Finale 1998. I had a brief affair with Linux in the early 00's. There was an open source program (I don't remember its name; perhaps it was Noteworthy). Very unfriendly, it had not a GUI, and you had to write code in an ordinary text editor and run the file through the program to get the score. There was a Linux flavor which provided a GUI for that text-oriented program, called "Musescore", I believe; you could see the score on screen and use the mouse, and I think it had MIDI playback too; the program generated automatically the text file with the code to be parsed with the non-GUI program to generate the printable score. Everything rather clunky and user-unfriendly back then, and the scores did not look that good. Those open source programs should be much improved now, I guess...

[adrianallan]

Started with Music Time in about 1995 for the Apple Mac.
Did about 10 scores on it for guitar.
Then got Notation Composer for PC in 2005 which was great, but only had midi sounds, so I then got East West sounds and Cubase and exported the sounds.
I have used Sibelius 5 for the last 3 years and think it's great, but I haven't come up with any decent musical ideas for a few months - I never move from pen and paper if my muse isn't working properly or I have nothing original to say.

[ttw]

I started with some free programs (Noteworthy?) the I bought "Music Time" which wasn't bad. I upgraded that to Encore which I really liked. Then Encore sort of died (I guess, like Franco, it's still dead for all practical purposes.) I tried the free Make Music Notepad. It was good, but limiting. Then MM offered me a very cheap upgrade to Finale which I have stuck with.

I did try demos of Sibelius, Igor, the Unicorn thing, and others. None did as well or were as easy to use as Finale.

[Kevin]

I went to Finale on the reccomendation of a composer friend and found it very easy to use. I made the switch when I wanted to get some of my music out into the big wide world. Unfortunately Finale never let me do that. Hence the switch to Sibelius 3 at the time.