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

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-software-music-score-wav-mp3/225915>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 25, 2004, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-software-music-score-wav-mp3/225915 "2004-01-25T00:15:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Stanislav](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Stanislav](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stanislav)\
**Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-software-music-score-wav-mp3/225915/1 "2004-01-25T00:15:18Z")

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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?

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**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\
**Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-software-music-score-wav-mp3/225915/2 "2004-01-25T00:27:13Z")

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[Finale](http://www.finalemusic.com/) is an industry standard for notation, but it sounds like you’d be more interested in the simple free version, [Finale Notepad](http://www.finalemusic.com/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).

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**Author:** ![Garfield226](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Garfield226](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Garfield226)\
**Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-software-music-score-wav-mp3/225915/3 "2004-01-25T06:18:32Z")

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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](http://www.sibelius.com) \*\*.

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**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\
**Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-software-music-score-wav-mp3/225915/4 "2004-01-25T14:37:27Z")

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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.