Myriad Melody Assistant certainly can be downloaded and tried before you pay money - I know because I did (on principle I refused to pay money for anything before I'd tried a demo). Can't remember the differences, but I think it's an annoying popup window on startup and limited number of bars you can create, or something like that.

I'd never used the dulcimer feature, but I went looking and it does indeed exist. DAA and DAD are standard options, and you can select any other custom tuning. Mandolin works the same as guitar, and there's a standard option for that too. I don't know how you use tab for autoharp and tin whistle, so I couldn't comment on those.

MA can export to most major formats - ABC, MIDI, ASCII tab, even MP3 if you want. Similarly it can import from most major formats as well. It won't read in scans directly, but I believe there are programs which can take in a bitmap and feed out a MIDI file, so that might fill that gap. I've never used them myself though, and knowing how accurate OCR generally is, I wouldn't trust their accuracy too far.

The only major thing I've found MA is missing is any option to indicate barre for fretted instruments. That's on the Myriad requests list, but so far it's not been added. Wait and see, I guess. Also, although it supports tweaking the rhythm for things like hornpipes (where it's notated in quavers but played in triplets), it doesn't remember about that when it exports to tab, which is a shame. And like every program, it sometimes has problems with multi-part melodies on a regular stave. There's apparently a "multi-voice stave" option I can use, but I've not tried it yet.

There apparently are a bunch of other features on Harmony Assistant, which is much more expensive. I've never felt the need to upgrade though and I've been using it for the last year to do arranging for classical guitar and to work out harmony lines for trad tunes. Melody Assistant does all I need it for. Maybe if you needed orchestral arrangements then you might want to upgrade, but I suspect for trad folk then Melody Assistant will do you fine.

And if it doesn't, you've not lost any money if you try the shareware version first. :-)

Graham.