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I understand that RT uses .net which is interpreted (really compiled on the fly) and programs using pure .net will run on either RT or 8. So programs written for 8, if your careful not to use any other API, will run on RT and RT programs will run on 8.

Not the api the friggin compiler is the difference. You will still need to use an arm capable Visual Studio and compile two completely different binaries. Secondly from what I have read the arm libraries and header files will not do a considerable number of calls, especially audio and graphics C# calls that you would normally use for x86. So there will be considerable amounts of code that will be very significantly different.

This is why the serious dev houses like Finale and the like are avoiding RT in droves. It will require gobs of in house retraining. Although a touch capable music notation interface would be a really wonderful thing it will take quite a while until something as fundamental as a comprehensive touch capable music notation interface is ever ported to the Microsoft app store! Fact is Ipads and Androids are allot closer to having this kind of useful feature. And as for games, unless Microsoft has cooked up a shitload of them themselves their app store will be a epic fail.

Really. Somebody needs to tell these people... they write the standard to which all music notation software is held, and it runs on the Mac.

When you think about it... all these musical accompaniment systems react in real-time to MIDI input.

Minor nit-pick here... MIDI is by definition computer-generated, sometimes in response to direct human input (like a human playing a MIDI keyboard, for instance). SmartMusic, for example, takes microphone input from a live performer and "follows" the performer with a predefined accompaniment. If I play my saxophone into the microphone, MIDI is not the result, but the computer can somewhat follow me, so long as I am playing something for which it has an accompaniment program. Recent versions of Finale can supposedly generate such an accompaniment. (I give these products as examples only, not as software I would endorse; for a number of reasons, I really don't care for this company's software.)

The robot in the article, if it is taking input from a microphone, is not directly taking MIDI input.

If your issues are less related to the specific instrument and more to sight-reading and general theory, I'd recommend notation software. Coda's Finale Notepad is a free, someone limited version of the Finale notation package. I prefer Noteworthy Composer which is very accessible for people less versed in theory, while Brahms is a good Linux package. I've found that writing music is one of the best ways to learn how it works, and being able to play it back quickly, either through ALSA, a MIDI keyboard or Windows software synth allows you to experiment easily with notation and theory.

But how about the other areas of study? I used to take music theory and people would rant and rave about their Macs or one of various composing suites in Windows. I tried explaining that Linux has (certainly more affordable) solutions to offer in this department too but no one would even listen to me. It's not like they were mixing platinum selling records, they were just looking for software to write sheet music with.

Ironically, the only area that Linux can (could?) compete at the moment is in mixing platinum selling records, with software like Ardour.

For scorewriting there really is nothing that can compete with Sibelius on Windows or Mac - even Finale doesn't really come close when it comes to ease of use - and ultimately that is what is important for such applications. The software should be transparent to the user, and not require a degree in computer science to figure out (for example LilyPond).

I think GPO gets a lot of press because it's easy to use. Finale now comes with a version. However, the system requirements for GPO are insane. I can't get more than 5 or 6 samples playing on my 2.5 Gigahertz Athlon. And that is when it's being slaved from my Mac.

EastWest has a great samples as well. Of course, Native Instruments has some excellents sounds as well.

In the past couple years, Apple has been releasing really great pro-level apps for music, video, and now photography. This is good, but what *I* really want is a competitor for MakeMusic's Finale, which is a professional-grade program for music notation (like Microsoft Word, but for musical scores).

Finale is actually really powerful (and expensive). It can do pretty much anything most people need for their notation. Unfortunately, it is the worst UI trainwreck I have ever encountered. It is lacking in a clear, simple, unified interface or an intuitive organization. Seemingly simple and basic options are buried deep in the mess. And the help files are almost worthless.

For example, instead of clicking notes in, you can use your keyboard to enter notes.

But I don't know what key does what.
So I go into the key map options, but I still can't find the default key map. It just allows me to create a custom key map.
I'm like 'okay the help files will learn me where the default or current key map is--or maybe even tell me WHAT it is!'
Nope. No search results for "key map" in the really outdated help software that comes with it (it looks like it is a port from OS 9).

This kind of stuff happens to me all the time. Apple, please release "Notes" or something! You could make a killing!

http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/default.aspx

and pick up a FREE copy of finale notepad which isnt really the supreme "composing" software but will work for entry and playback. Unfortunately, the free Finale Notepad doeasnt support scanning IIRC which can be nice (scan in a piece of sheet music and it interprets the notation) though its not so hard to find a copy of Finale 2006 floating around if you look.

Try Finale at http://www.finalemusic.com/ from Code software.

It will let you enter music note by note, or from a midi keyboard. Best of all, it will let you import sheet music with your scanner, very slick.

I know that at my local college I can pick up the student edition for next to nothing.

lilypond -m score.ly

As an alternative you can use the ABC format. You can then use abc2ly to convert to Lilypond format and then use the command above to convert to MIDI. Example:

abc2ly score.abc
lilypond -m score.ly

I know you asked for open-source software, but if you are using a Mac or Windows machine you might want to look at Finale Notepad. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.

As a musician, and someone who publishes their own work, why would I go through the effort to use this program? Using Finale with TgTools gives me just about everything I could want in a music notation program.......

I do most of my work in a sequencer (Digital Performer), and then dump the Midi file into Finale to make it look nice.

I think what is REALLY needed is some sort of OPEN FORMAT to save music files into. Perhaps this will bridge the gap. So, if I want to give a file to someone with Sibelius, they can open it. Make changes, and send it back.

But, in reality, I don't see that happening. It's a lot easier, if you are serious about it, to have both programs. Most guys I know who make a living printing/scoring music have both.

The other thing I would do would be to give the files that I used to create the music. In my case, it's Finale. But, I have YET to do that. I like to retain some sort of credits for doing the work. PDF allows me to do that. And if they want to hear it, creating an MP3 of a score is simple as well.

Take a good look at the format. Its a spec defining how to digitize musical scores. When was the last time you went looking online for the score of a particular website? Whe was the last time you went looking online for a score that you could legally download?

This is an important protocol - for all those projects out there digitizing old music scores. Think classical music like Beethoven/Mozart. Up until recently, everyone in this buisness made their own homegrown system. Just to give a taste of where this project comes from:

• Humdrum Toolkit - a toolkit used by Stanford, Ohio State, and some other universities
• Finale one of the first visual score editing programs. Proprietarty format hacked by researchers.
• Score the 800 lb gorilla ofthe market. Music publications use this exclusively.
• GUIDO - another notation system developed for and by researchers.

These are just the standards I know of. This site lits many more I've never heard of. Hopefully MusicXML obsoletes these countless competing standards so those who research in this field can finally exchange data with one another - without porting around and maintating a collection of converters.

However, this really is irrelevant for the vast majority of slashdot readers. Unless your trying to digitize musical transcriptions, this standard is a curiosity at best. I have to wonder why it made the slashdot front page.

There are others, but at this point they really play no true part in the competition game. Now, when one of them is capable of creating scores as attractive, flexible, and (most important for 99% of users) easily (which means not CLI-based, sorry), the big guys will start paying attention. Combine that with a simlar or lower price-point, and you have recipe for success, because I have yet to meet a user of any notation program who didn't have some gripes about it, or who would be unwilling to look to other programs.

Vocals aside, there are a couple options that composers can use to produce nice sounding mp3s of their songs. Finale lets you compose on a staff very easily, and it can make midis that sound much better than any that I've heard before. Then there are the trackers, for example Modplug tracker, which can use any samples you wish, and are generally more quick to compose with.

Finale is great. Sibelius is great. Their price point, however, leaves much to be desired. Finale does have watered-down versions of their software. Allegro has most of the features of Finale, but is still pricey at ~$200. Finale also offers NotePad as a free download from their website, but as I have personally found out, it is very crippled, not intuitive, and generally uncustomizable.

I would recommend over all these other apps Finale's PrintMusic. PrintMusic offers many of the features of Finale and Allegro, has professional quality output just like Finale, but at a much lower price of $70. Four-part chorale notation and lyrics are a snap, and easily accomodates three-stave-per-system organ notation. All the functionality for what you need, without leaving you with that freshly cornholed feeling after shelling out the dough for Finale or Sibelius.

Just another note about some of the new things involved with this latest version of Finale. You will be able to save your Finale projects as PDFs. This is quite handy for online publishing of your music, and also frees up the time wasted on transfering the file into a more readilly accessible format. Finale is also allowing you to create scripts for it. Allowing you to save a lot of effort converting multiple files into a new arrangement or transpasition. Another addition, which I am grateful for, using finale almost everyday, is the addition of a cue tool, to help create musical cues for performers. Overall, having taken the tour of Finale 2k4 on Coda's Website , there seems to be many improvements that will help with some of the more complicated tasks that it can do, and streamlining some simple tasks that were overly complex in the program. This looks to be a giant leap for the program.

Finale - this is like the Microsoft Office of music notation - seems easy to use at first, really annoying once you try to do more complicated things, but has thousands of features. No other program has as many features as Finale, even though Finale implements many of them quite poorly. Totally unintuitive and not very Mac-like. Unfortunately, Finale files are the standard file format in the industry, so if you're going to be trading sheet music with other composers, you'll need to have Finale. See also their low-end versions, Finale Allegro and PrintMusic - there's nothing at all wrong with these if you don't need the features they leave out - mainly the ability to work with large scores and do part extraction.

Sibelius - intuitive, Mac-like. Easier to use than Finale, though some things take some getting used to. Not quite as powerful. Buggy - not more so than Finale, but in different ways. In theory it can open Finale files - not sure how well it really works.

Low-end WYSIWYG notation software:

Harmony Assistant

Lime Music Notation

Unix (may work on Mac OS X with Apple's X11):

Rosegarden

Text-based (no GUI, but renders nice output):

MusicTeX

Lilypond

Sequencers (may do a little bit of notation):

Intuem

Cubase et. al from Steinberg

Logic Audio

Please feel free to add and re-post. If someone wants to compile prices for all of these, that would be great.

Finale is a very nice package of software which I cannot live without, but it doesn;t sound like this guy needs that much, and I think I can save him $400. Allegro is just as good, made by the same folks, without some of the advanced functionality (unlimited staves, customized staves, etc.). It also is not supported under OSX, ya' gotta use classic mode.

Check out Finale by Coda. I used the software for scoring music quite some time ago, and it was sufficient for my music theory classes. They have Mac OS versions available. The only downside - it is a commercial product.

Finale is pretty much the standard on the Mac for notation.