Encore does have a new distributor but the Passport Company that designed it is out of business. It does have a new home, however. A search engine should get you there.

As re timing, the most important aspect of a lead sheet is just getting the essential melody notes and the chords down. The interpretive parts such as fermatas, rubatos, swing phrasing et. al. can be suggested by written instructions. For copyright purposes, you don't need a lead sheet full of heavy duty syncopations or dynamic markings. If you are writing a chart for an arrangement, then this is a different story. As close to the sound that you hear, you want to capture on paper. Even then, a lot is given to musicians and their ability to interpret the style of music. IE: you could write out a bluegrass tune but it would take a bluegrass musician to give it the right feeling.

I get the feeling that you might want to do more than just leadsheets, Rick and that a better equipped software program would serve you. Encore seems to be the most flexible but there is Mosaic for Mac and there are others to research.

The reason transcribers charge $100 per page has to do with a couple of things. 1. They are sometimes musician union members and there is a copyist scale. 2. The hardest part of annotation is getting down what the composer intended. 3. Professional copyists have usually used special music copying pens for recording work. There was a bias against computer generated lead sheets and scores in the Hollywood music community for many years but this might be changing now. 4. It's not the most fun work in the world to do. There is more motivation to do it when there is a definable goal, learning a song, copyrighting an original song or catagloguing for a songbook or compilation, and teaching songs to others. It's a chore, no matter how you look at it that is time consuming but software makes it easier than doing it by hand.

Frank Hamilton