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It is Myriad's Virtual Singer singing lead on my little ditty,

"Before They Kill"

(The guitar is real. Electric, but real.)

And Virtual Singer is the core of my Space Angel Choir,

Psychopompous and
Interior Dasein.

Yes, there are programs like that. I can only mention one that I've used, OMeR (http://myriad-online.com/en/products/omer.htm). It does optical recognition of scanned sheet music. I've had varying results with it, but as good as 95% recognition. This was a few years ago.

(I am not affiliated with Myriad Online.)

They don't need to though. I mostly use the computer as an always-available backing band when I have an idea I want to try. I use Harmony Assistant to set up a backing track, and record my own performance to overlay with the Harmony sounds.

It's not the same as the real thing, but it's helpful. I think of it as a prototype, the way a sketch is step on the way to a portrait.

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

I also monkeyed around with a program called (drum roll...) "Virtual Singer.." They have samples online, including a German rendition of Ave Maria.

It pretty much sounds like Stephen Hawking with a vocoder, but the idea is there :)

I also monkeyed around with a program called (drum roll...) "Virtual Singer.." They have samples online, including a German rendition of Ave Maria.

It pretty much sounds like Stephen Hawking with a vocoder, but the idea is there :)

Virtual Singer has been a favorite of mine for playing around.

The software is of (lesser) but similar quality to the demos I just checked out for this new engine.

But, it also begs the question: what *really* is the purpose of software designed to replace humans going to be used for besides... replacing humans?

The appeal seems to be to small-time musicians/hobbyists (no money to pay people) and big-time corporations (wanna keep more money for themselves). 8/

Dunno about ConcertWare importing, but Melody Assistant has to be the best cheap notation program I've ever used. It has all the other features you mention, and costs $15 (!) with indefinite free updates (which happen at regular intervals, with many new features). It's definitely worth a look.

I have seen this program called Virtual Singer and it has been doing something similar for a while. I tried to get a sample mp3 from their website, but the links weren't working.

As far as I know this program is actually synthesizing rather than basing it on samples and they have a "Real Singer" module that does it based on samples. It has a score that you can make and it will sing to the notes on your score.

The folks over at myriad-online.com have software that has been doing this for a couple of years now (virtual singer)... I have used their technology. I have a few demos over at: http://www.view3d.tv click on gallery and then click the music button (its flash based) on left side... Regards, Daniel

Fun toy.

Fun toy.

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.

Sibelius

Harmony Assistant

Lime Music Notation

This is for the lazy, if you want to read on by all means do so (I may have missed a few). This was a great question because I was looking for the same answer!!! Thanks Ask Slashdot!

I'd check out Myriad's Melody Assistant or it's more powerful and more expensive sibling Harmony Assistant. Melody is $15 shareware and quite powerful.

I can't compare the speed of notation with other programs as I haven't used them much. Its been great for the work I've done, however.

I'd check out Myriad's Melody Assistant or it's more powerful and more expensive sibling Harmony Assistant. Melody is $15 shareware and quite powerful.

I can't compare the speed of notation with other programs as I haven't used them much. Its been great for the work I've done, however.

I'd check out Myriad's Melody Assistant or it's more powerful and more expensive sibling Harmony Assistant. Melody is $15 shareware and quite powerful.

I can't compare the speed of notation with other programs as I haven't used them much. Its been great for the work I've done, however.