On the subject of old music software, I have a floppy for Cakewalk 3.0 here and I still use the program which as far as I can make out would run on a 286. It is still my favourite MIDI editing tool (I prefer it to later versions I have tried) but at the moment I am more concerned with abc and I don't like MIDI to abc conversions so am using other software (currently Noteworthy).

I have never used the high quality notation software such as Finale but for my purposes, if I want to try to make something to play, MIDI rules and Cakewalk is a "Rolls Royce" in that department as I believe Cubase is.

For my purposes at folkinfo, abc rules the day. I have yet to find the "perfect" editing program but matters can only improve in time and there is active development both with abc and the etension, the abc plus project. It fits my needs well: Plain text format - few posting troubles (abc does use angle brackets to make entering dotted rythms such as hornpipes easier so in a similar way to the new Linebreak option here, I have an abc option wich effectively ingnores HTML), no hassle over loading and storing binary data in the db and there are several good console apps for conversions - I run: abc2midi, adcm2ps and Ghostscript to handle postscript output to make .png and .pdf files from .ps. I'm really hoping abc has a long and good future ahead of it and believe that for my type of Internet apps, it is the best choice by quite a margin.

Jon