Music Software Question

Factual Questions
1

Forgive the vague wording, but I’m not sure of the correct phrases.

I am looking for a graphical program that will allow the user to “draw” music.

It should be possible to drag the various symbols (clefs, assorted notes etc.) onto the 5 horizontal lines.
Clef, crotchet and minim. I have reached the limit of my musical knowledge.
Happy humbug to you all

2

http://www.cakewalk.com/

oldy but goody

3

Cakewalk sux. Get Finale.

4

Both are expensive. Try NoteWorthy Composer, which is free, but not nearly as powerful.

5

I use finale for my compositional needs. It is a bit pricey and a lot of the cheaper software can do what it does. Finale also has a fairly steep learning curve but the tutorials are somewhat helpful.

I have used one called Notation that was a bit more intuitive but it didn’t have all the fancy playback features that Finale offers. Where Finale currently fails, in my opinion, is that you have to layer tracks over a staff to write music with different parts being in a different time signature. For example, with guitar music you often have melody and harmony on the same line (not necessarily with some 20th century music) and they often don’t play in the same rhythm. Every time, you write something out of that rhythm you must have it on a different lair or Finale will automatically change the rhythm to the current note value.

With that said, if you plan on selling your compositions, Finale is the industry standard. It is worth learning and in the long run can actually net you a decent amount of money. In college I used to hire myself out as a musical transcriptionist for 20 bucks a page (or roughly 20 bucks for every 32 measures written with series of rests not being counted).

6

Thanks
Once again I am in awe of your brains.

(big juicy brains)

7

Finale also comes in a free download version Finale Notepad, that is good enough for my needs to just notate the music. You need to upgrade if you want MIDI input & output, and other stuff that pros might need.

8
      • Cakewalk’s advantage is that it supports soundfonts–you can assign different soundfont bank/instruments to different MIDI channels. So you get some version of it (I have Home Studio 2002, it has staff view/editing) and a SoundblasterLive5.1 soundcard (OEM/whitebox is very cheap these days) and play your MIDI files using soundfonts (that you download off the net for free). Regular MIDI sounds cheap, but it can actually sound quite nice this way.
        ~
9

Are soundfonts a different sort of patches (MIDI patches)?

10

Could somebody please explain the difference between Finale and Cakewalk Sonar?

11

I use Music@Passport to transfer sheet music to computer. I can’t play a keyboard but M@P allows one to point & click notes & rests onto the staff. Too bad that Passport Designs went out of business and their library has been acquired by some other company. M@P is no longer produced though it’s somewhat inferior stablemate Music Time is, but the current owner of the software rights is charging $100 for it.

12

Sibelius is another music notation software offering and is pretty easy to use, though I personally use Finale. Finale does over a version that is a free download from their site, it’s called Finale Notepad.