As a longtime owner of Finale I'd recommend trying all the best free and low-cost shareware before spending any serious money. When I bought Finale, most of the great open-source programs we have today didn't exist. The shareware that did exist, didn't meet even my simple needs—four-part choir music on a grand staff. Today I do all my four-part vocal music with tools from the ABC Plus project. The editor I use (GNU Emacs) is a programmer's editor and the non-technical user probably wouldn't use it. Still, there are other free editors with special modes for ABC.

If you are a keyboard player, you may want a program that lets you input music from your keyboard via a MIDI cable. If you aren't a keyboard player (that would be me) typing ABC code is orders of magnitude faster than trying to play a tune into the computer or using Finale's graphical note placement interfaces.

I even upgraded Finale when they came up with the microphone input feature but I was sorely disappointed. I had some luck just running my tele directly into the mic input but it still was way more trouble than just typing ABC. And with ABC, entering synchronized lyrics is much easier than trying to use Finale's lyrics tools.

My frustration with Finale, as compared with ABC, isn't because I don't understand computers or arcane interfaces. I've been a computer professional for 37 years and am very comfortable with all types of computers.

Be sure the software you choose imports and exports standard open formats for music exchange. A list of formats includes ABC, LilyPond, Common Music Notation (CMN), MusixTex and MusicXML. MIDI is a standard format too of course but it doesn't really make provision for all the information you'd expect to see in a score.

All of this discussion supposes that you're looking for software whose primary goal is to produce a nice looking printed page. If your interest is centered more around creating sound files, you'll want different tools. You'll want specialized recording, editing and MIDI sequencing software and I have no familiarity with any of that.

Beware the claims of software companies. As one who has purchased millions of dollars worth of software for large corporate installations I can say there is one sure way to tell that a software salesman is lying… his lips are moving. That sounds like I'm really cynical about software but I'm really not. I just know what the industry is like and how far the truth is usually stretched.

Whether you spend $800 or $8 for your software, the true cost is in the time it takes to understand it and learn to use if effectively. Don't expect any program to be as useful as you'd hoped right off the bat. You need to spend significant time with each product you try before deciding that you can't make it work for you. Everyone works in a little different way and that give rise to a wide array of available tools.

      - Mark



NB: Here's something you can try. Pull up the thread called MIDI Volunteer Sought and scan down until you see one of the ABC tunes I posted. Highlight just the ABC code and copy it (Ctrl-C). Then visit the Tune-O-Tron: Converter, paste the ABC code (Crtl-V) in to the ABC Convert-A-Matic text box and click the submit button. The converter will return a page with a low-res image of the score and three links just above that will return a beautifly engraved score and the associated MIDI file for listening. If these meet your needs, you're there. You don't even have to download software if you'd rather not. Use Windows Notepad to type in the score and just copy it and past it in at the Tune-O-Matic: Converter site. To learn about ABC encoding and to see what it's capabilities are, read Guido Gonzatto's great manual Typesetting Music With ABC. It has all the informatin you'll need to get started.