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When I was a kid, I'd do that with Noteworthy Composer or similar, although I'm sure there's some freeware around to do it. There is software around that will convert MIDI files to staff notation.

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.

Check out n-Track Studio for recording (Windows only, but a great shareware program with a great maintainer) and Noteworthy Composer for composition.

n-Track is a great alternative to the home recording software big boys (Cubase, Sonar, etc.)--much cheaper than the full versions and much more powerful than the "lite" versions. You'll be doing some pretty fancy stuff before you run into limitations with n-Track.

I haven't really kept up with the world of composition software, but back when I was interested in it, Noteworthy Composer was the only program that had sensible keyboard-based input. To do anything with Finale and other programs I'd tried, I had to click to change the note duration, click to add ornamentation, click on the staff to add a note, and so on. Noteworthy Composer gives you a cursor on the staff and there are easy keyboard shortcuts for the most common actions. Pressing Enter inserts a note at the cursor, holding down Ctrl adds the note to the current chord, +/- change note duration, arrow keys do the obvious thing, and you can use alt with the arrow keys to move up/down octaves on the staff or across measures. I tried several other programs, but this interface just felt way more natural and efficient than anything else...

Everyone is hung up on his, perhaps, ill advised comments on Photoshop. But his comments on Palm Desktop versus Outlook are spot on. Too often user interfaces are designed by techies, for techies, without regard for how it will actually be used by knowledgeable users. Interestingly, it is the same argument which the commercial software lobby use to beat FOSS, ignoring how poor their own products usually are in the same way.

So rather than getting bogged down in photo editing software, I'd be far more interested in people citing examples of software which has a well thought out UI, which allows simple things to be done without either having to master a lot of complexity or have the software use a condescending tone (the "rinky-dink" Dvorak talks about).

I'll start with Noteworthy Composer: for fine output I'll work with Lilypond, but for quickly jotting down a bit of music and preparing a presentable printout and midi stream it "does exactly what it says on the tin."

I used the Noteworthy Composer demo a while back, it is a nice score-based midi editor.

I doubt looking at 20 levels of XML open tag and close tags will be more readable for average users, and even for some programmers, than binary chunks. Besides, NoteWorthy composer have been making MIDI readable for average musicians for ages.

Actually, NoteWorthy Composer has been making MIDI scores readable for humans since Windows 3.1 days.