About music notation software

I am a bit back-logged this week because of getting Music School off the ground. Things are going well but there is an immense amount of work. I am again reminded that it is easy to do things but it is very hard to do things well. I am trying to do Music School well. So far, everything seems to be running fairly smoothly considering the complexity of the technology and systems.

More about that later. One of the things I had to research for students was music notation software and I thought I would pass along what I learned.

I know successful writers who still write out arrangements on staff paper by hand. There is nothing wrong with that of course but let’s face it: living in the dark ages is going to hold you back. It is slow and tedious and limiting in numerous ways. If you plan on writing music for a while, you need to invest the time needed to learn music notation software. Yes, it might take a few weeks to get anywhere but once you are up to speed, you can notate music very fast. That is especially true if you connect a keyboard.

Finale is the software I have used for years. It is easily the most widely used notation software among writers and publishers. A lot of people like a competitive software option called Sibelius; some of them are so passionate about Sibelius that they will argue about the differences for a day and a half.

They might be right. And frankly, I have not always been thrilled with Finale. Their customer service is not great. But Sibelius is a sinking ship. The company that owns it cut development funding and unless something happens, it is going to die. Though it might well be better than Finale, who wants to go to the trouble of learning software that will be gone in a few years?

The problem with Finale is it is expensive: maybe $400 or so. If you are a student, you can get it for $250. If you are willing to buy an older version (and I see no good reason why you shouldn’t), you can get it cheaper.

But if you plan on doing any kind of professional writing, you basically just have to bite the bullet and buy it in my opinion. It pains me to say that because like I said, I am no big fan of the company that makes it.

If money is a problem however, the good news is that there are free options and apparently quite good ones. I asked for opinions on my Facebook page recently and people were very positive about two in particular: MuseScore and NoteFlight. I have never used either but I can’t find anyone that says anything bad about them.

One other free option is Finale Notepad which is a lite version of Finale. The advantage of using that software is that it is compatible with Finale. If you ever decide to upgrade, you will already pretty much know the interface and should be able to open your Notepad files in Finale with no problems.

Probably any of these free options will have all the functionality you need including MIDI support. I would probably steer people toward Notepad though for the reasons I mentioned.