The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #89918   Message #1699578
Posted By: JohnInKansas
21-Mar-06 - 04:13 PM
Thread Name: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
As long as they want printed copy, there are a number of programs that should be okay. Noteworthy is pretty good, but does have some "quirks."

Finale is one of the better programs, but is expensive. A problem, particularly if you don't read music fairly fluently and have to just "make it look like" a sample you have, is that the "better" programs can require a significant bit of study just to get them turned on and get started.

LinInKansas, my cellmate, has been using PrintMusic (2001 version) for a couple of years, and finds it adequate for printing her own tunebook. It makes decent looking scores as long as the defaults work for the stuff you're scoring; but lacks some of the "tweaks" I'd like to have for moderately more complex layouts. It is a pretty good basic program.

Encore is another that's frequently recommended for lots of chrome and go-fast stripes, and is perhaps a little cheaper than some other "professional" grade programs. They have recently offered a less fancied program called MusicTimeDeluxe that looks like it may have pretty good capabilities, (and that may be able to read the old files from my really good program that won't run on WinXP..). I've been "thinking about" trying it out when a get a spare $100 (US) or so.

The problem is that there are too many programs that might do what you want, and the only way to know if you've got the right one is to learn enough about one to know that you're driving it the way it should be driven - and you're getting results that satisfy you.

John