MetaChat - Ask MetaChat Musicians:

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10 November 2006

Ask MetaChat Musicians: Is Finale the best software for what I want to do? I don't need to hook a midi keyboard up to my computer or anything. I just want to click on a staff and place notes, then hit play and hear the music in midi form. Finale is a huge pain in the ass for entering music, but so were all the others I found. Any suggestions? →[More:]

So far I'm using it to transcribe songs I hear, to write out simplifications of complex pieces, and to generate musical examples for classical music presentations.

post by: agropyron at: 10:14 | 7 comments

have you checked out Sibelius? (sorry about embedded music). That's what all my musician friends use and they consider it to be a standard program. I've not used it myself.

posted by altolinguistic 10 November | 10:23

The only thing I've used at all is Melody Assistant, which has served my (limited) needs pretty well and is super cheap.

posted by cortex 10 November | 11:08

I've used both Sibelius and Finale a fair amount and found it easier to punch stuff in with Sibelius. If you get acquainted with it you can do virtually everything without hands leaving the (computer) keyboard or you can work pretty effectively with one hand typing and one mousing. There is not any program that makes it as easy as writing out by hand on staff paper - though that's pretty painstaking too, if you want to do any kind of nice job of it.

Believe it or not, you may find a non-GUI typesetter like Lilypond easier than anything.

posted by Wolfdog 10 November | 12:20

...for typesetting, that is. Not for playback.

posted by Wolfdog 10 November | 12:28

Oh, and I just remembered - before I could afford Sibelius, I used Noteworthy for a long time and, actually, as I recall, it was excellent at what it did, and rather easy to type stuff in.

posted by Wolfdog 10 November | 12:30

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try the various demos of these programs.

I'm trying Melody Assistant now, and it has a very nice feature: When the program is minimized, the system tray icon says "Melody Ass".

posted by agropyron 10 November | 12:42

Oh, man, Noteworthy (for 3.1), now that brings back fond memories.

posted by mischief 10 November | 23:43

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