Looking for Software: Music Score ---> WAV/MP3

I’m looking for software that will allow me to plot notes on a musical staff, change voicings and instrumental sounds, and then output the completed project to a WAV/MP3 file. Not looking for anything professional – just something to play around with. Prefer freeware or shareware as I am a po’ person. Anyone know of such an animal?

Finale is an industry standard for notation, but it sounds like you’d be more interested in the simple free version, Finale Notepad. I’ve not used the latter, but I’m sure it’ll do most of what you need…the playback is through MIDI, but you can export MIDI files from the program (once again, I’m presuming all this is possible with the free version).

Excellent reply by GorillaMan, and I just thought I’d add that along with Finale, the OTHER industry standard (at least, the two we used at Indiana University, one of the USA’s top music schools) is **Sibelius **.

There’s at least one more that I know of, which isn’t free but might be cheaper than Sibelius–Band in a Box. Never used it very much myself and the couple times that I have I was making a percussion part off a partial or full score, so I was doing manual note entry by keyboard and mouse and not using the MIDI keyboard.