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Digitizing music has been going on for quite some time--the best of the apps is PhotoScore:

Neuratron PhotoScore

You can find tons of public domain music at the Werner Icking Music Archive, save the PDFs, and open the PDFs in PhotoScore. You can then open them in Sibelius or another music editing application.

That looked as good as any print music I've ever seen.

I recommend that you read Lilypond's essay on the topic. This is an OK start, but there is a long way to go before this is even remotely as good as professionally printed music. This is even worse than Finale scores.* I suggest you look at Noteflight or Scorch for other examples. Specifically, the noteheads are small, the stems are too long, and the whole rest should be centered in the measure. Maybe Han-Wen can give him some pointers.

* I used to hate reading Finale scores back in the 90's. That was hot shit back then, but I always found it sterile and blocky. Lifeless, boring, etc. Luckily most homebrew guys have switched to Sibelius, which is somewhat better.

Anyway, this just shows you that piracy has always been a problem for Ubisoft and other software publishers. Piracy is what ultimately killed the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.

I disagree. The Atari ST remained popular in niches it had carved out long after it had more-or-less died elsewhere. The problem was (and remains) that carving out a lucrative niche with computing is damn difficult, and if you're doing it on non-commodity hardware, someone whose product works on a bog-standard PC can add "Doesn't require you to invest in some unusual computer which costs $$$ and has precious real benefit other than running one piece of software" to their list of selling points.

Sooner or later that becomes an attractive selling point, and when it does the software developer who until now was basically providing the only reason for anyone to buy your hardware will port their product. Case in point: Sibelius.

When was the last time Microsoft did something the customers wanted, instead of forcing them to "take it or leave it".

I've never been forced to. I upgrade/install on my own. Work/corporate environment is a different story, but at home I choose my OS.

When was the last time any Office application didn't brake file compatibility with previous versions.

Saving or reading? I just save in XP/2000/2007 format. Works fine, including with openoffice, which is what I use anyway.

When was the last time you felt like you actually own a Microsoft software product, and don't have to rent it AND justify yourself every time you need to install it on a new computer?

I've installed and re-installed XP many, many times. I have always felt like I owned it. I've installed Vista (and Windows 7, actually) multiple times with no problem. Yes, I "register" or activate it. No issues with it. Even the phone activation is quite simple. Some of my other software, like Sibelius gives me a much, much, much harder time with activation and whatnot. But it's good software and I like using it, so I deal with it.

Last time some Microsoft protocol didn't break compatibility with competing, or even older own protocols?

Like what?

I don't know, it feels like forever.

When was the last time you USED a Microsoft OS (or Office)?

But keep in mind that we're seeing compact devices sporting Linux and that's the real concern for Microsoft.

Er, didn't you just accuse me of jumping from desktop statistics to servers? Aren't you jumping from desktop stats to compact devices? hehe.

I don't think we'll be abandoning desktops anytime terribly soon, either... for one thing, people like big screens, not tiny screens.

Yes, Linux definitely has had an impact in the server world - but then, UNIX was around, IIRC, before a server edition of Windows ever existed, right? So it's Windows that has to "break" into that market, not the other way around.

Anyways, my general point was I don't think Microsoft is laying off people because of Linux. I think it's primarily the economy, and probably Vista. Even in my defense of Microsoft to some extent, I don't like Vista that much... or at all, really.

/me grumbles about Sibelius not being released for Linux.

It's either music notation software, or the Governor of Kansas.

I'm guessing the first one.

Sibelius is a popular music notation software package.
It has become pretty popular in the past 5ish years since its learning curve isn't nearly as steep as its main competitor Finale.

People criticize Sibelius since, typically (at least for the versions I've used), its output isn't exactly professional quality.
It is, however, a great tool for music students.

Back in the day, Finale was the only option for amateur composers to produce professional looking manuscripts.
I'm not sure how far Sibelius has come in the last few years, so things might have changed.

http://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/download/get.pl?com=sh&prod=scorch

It's a plugin required by some sites to download sheet music or to view the first page before you buy it.
It's a major pain in the ass, it worked the first time I used it then upgrades didn't work and so on and so forth. I'm at the point where I don't care.

It's easier to find sheet music for free than it is to purchase it.

I've known two computer science majors out of about the ten at my school to have major problems getting Ubuntu (and Fedora for that matter) installed on their laptops. Either sound wasn't working, or wireless card, or the monitor, or in one case it wouldn't format/partition the hard drive correctly.

Frankly, I love Linux. I took Windows XP off my laptop and am doing a VirtualBox OSE virtual machine with XP installed and can even run Sibelius 5.1 on it. No 3D support is detrimental, but I have my desktops for that. But with all that, I can't honestly entirely recommend any Linux distro flat out to everyone. Myself, I've tried SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, and Ubuntu, and I liked SuSE best and am running 10.3. It actually supports all my hardware well, except for my video card - the ATI linux drivers for the x1400 mobile don't work well, but I got it mostly working eventually.

All this to simply say one thing: when it comes down to application support and to ease of use, Windows has quite a lead on Linux. Yeah, you can talk about wine and virtualization all you want, but I couldn't even get iTunes to work correctly in wine (yes, I can do it virtualized, so I'm happy about that, but are we going to really expect every normal office user to learn to use a virtual machine and all that, too?). I'm NOT anti-linux, nor pro-microsoft, but from a person that likes Linux better, I have to give credit to Microsoft for XP and its Office products being pretty good in terms of usability, functionality, versatility, and compatibility. Compatibility, for me personally, is big: I mean, seriously, my laptop is a year and a half old, and the drivers for the video card (which is older still, to some extent) don't work completely? And a Dell E1505 isn't exactly an uncommon laptop.

I think the parent to this particular thread is right - Microsoft DOES have some really good products, And yes, some really bad ones. Like Vista, IMO.

There are a number of other programs as well, including PhotoScore, part of the Sibelius suite... As well, I've had a great deal with the roll-your-own-OCR suite Gamera. Granted, you have to cobble together your own stuff, but you can mostly rely on pre-existing code. The advantage to Gamera is that you have a huge amount of flexibility, as you write your own processing scripts using Python.

In reference to this particular set of online music, I'm not sure how helpful a music OCR program would be though, as from what I've seen, they're mostly sub-100 dpi images, and most music OCR software recommends upwards of 300 dpi for accurate recognition.

However, if someone's just after Mozart midis, it's a heck of a lot easier to just go to ClassicalArchives.com. They have a huge amount of midi there. Granted, it's not likely based on the NMA, but if you're just after a midi, you probably don't care...

Will the scorch plug-in from Sibelius work for you? Sounds like it's pretty much designed for what you're looking for.
http://www.sibelius.com/products/scorch/index.html
http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/

I tell ya, it'd be friggin' sweet if someone would work on making a functional Music OCR program. Scanning a score using the piece-of-crap Photoscore into (the not-so-piece-of-crap) Sibelius always ends taking longer than actually inputting the music manually. I don't know about others who dabble in this software, but I'm sick and tired of a piece of dust being interpreted as a meter change.

I tell ya, it'd be friggin' sweet if someone would work on making a functional Music OCR program. Scanning a score using the piece-of-crap Photoscore into (the not-so-piece-of-crap) Sibelius always ends taking longer than actually inputting the music manually. I don't know about others who dabble in this software, but I'm sick and tired of a piece of dust being interpreted as a meter change.

I've been a amateur drummer for 25 years, and have tried a few software packages, but here are the ones I actually find useful.

Under Windows, for overdubbing wav and midi I mostly use Cakewalk (warning: link contains annoying self-playing music). I use the cheaper Home Studio. They have a real product differentiation problem as Sonar is the expensive product, and then they market or bundle cheaper versions that may cover your needs just fine (its hard to tell from the product descriptions which features are grayed out). I use Cakewalk because the Windows drivers can be used in a very low-latency mode, and I always have a Windows laptop kicking around. I have not liked the scoring side of Cakewalk.

Also under Windows, I have used Sibelius (version 3 and 4). It is a phenominal scoring program that produces great looking sheet music. This is the only thing I do with a PC that I think is really better than without the PC. If you score with a program that plays back what you've written via midi, you can correct many mistakes on the fly. Sibelius is unfortuately still phenominally expensive for my uses, and I've never purchased it (nor has anyone I know).

Under linux, the equivalent of Cakewalk is Rosegarden. It is very impressive at the moment. Building it is a royal pain for me. It doesn't use your standard autotools driven make, it uses Scons (not in my distribution). Scons requires a Python module that's not available in the stable version of Python. Hey, people writing free software can use whatever they want, its just a shame some people won't try their product because of the barrier to entry. I've had latency issues with Rosegarden + JACK which I think can be sorted out but I have to decide if I want to run the tools as root or pull in the whole SELinux overhead + realtime module (no different than Cakewalk in Windows -- it does not work well as non-admin). Rosegarden's scoring is coming along but not quite there for me.

For scoring under Linux, I'm using Lilypond. Lilypond is phenominal, but many won't like it because its markup-based (like writing Latex). You have to go through the compile cycle to view what you've written, and dump midi to hear it. Fortunately for me, rythym section music is very repetitive. The quality of printed music it can produce is unmatched. I'm sure more programs will start using Lilypond as a processing back-end.

Auralia can help with ear training (intervals and such), and Musition can help with learning music theory. I have used them both once to try them but never fully used them. Their normal use is for teachers to have students use to record their progress, but you can use it solo. When I took a music theory class we used a program called Finale to compose music, however it won't very much help with learning how to play an instrument.

I play guitar and for the most part I do not use software to aid in practice. I have tuner software (Enable Encore) that I can plug into which I occasionally use, and music composing software (Guitar Pro 5, G7, and Finale).

When beginning with an instrument it's best just to practice reading music manually. In the case of guitars, that would mainly be tabs. Guitarists much prefer tabs (finger positions on six lines for the six strings) when learning music as chords can contain many double notes and would look messy on a staff.

Anyway, with violin, you'll be reading staves. I'm not sure how much you know so I'll to to help a little: violins use the G clef, so the lines on the staff from bottom up are E, G, B, D, and F; and the spaces are F, A, C, and E. The strings on the violin from biggest to smallest are G, D, A, and E. Practice by saying a note and playing it, then move onto reading simple songs and playing them. I'm not used to fretless instruments so I have no idea how hard that is. :P

I doubt my advice there helped, but as for the software part: There isn't much that will help you learn how to play an instrument. It's best just to read music and practice playing it until you get the muscle memory that will assist you in both playing faster and playing with less thought.

Auralia can help with ear training (intervals and such), and Musition can help with learning music theory. I have used them both once to try them but never fully used them. Their normal use is for teachers to have students use to record their progress, but you can use it solo. When I took a music theory class we used a program called Finale to compose music, however it won't very much help with learning how to play an instrument.

I play guitar and for the most part I do not use software to aid in practice. I have tuner software (Enable Encore) that I can plug into which I occasionally use, and music composing software (Guitar Pro 5, G7, and Finale).

When beginning with an instrument it's best just to practice reading music manually. In the case of guitars, that would mainly be tabs. Guitarists much prefer tabs (finger positions on six lines for the six strings) when learning music as chords can contain many double notes and would look messy on a staff.

Anyway, with violin, you'll be reading staves. I'm not sure how much you know so I'll to to help a little: violins use the G clef, so the lines on the staff from bottom up are E, G, B, D, and F; and the spaces are F, A, C, and E. The strings on the violin from biggest to smallest are G, D, A, and E. Practice by saying a note and playing it, then move onto reading simple songs and playing them. I'm not used to fretless instruments so I have no idea how hard that is. :P

I doubt my advice there helped, but as for the software part: There isn't much that will help you learn how to play an instrument. It's best just to read music and practice playing it until you get the muscle memory that will assist you in both playing faster and playing with less thought.

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).

Try Sibelius.

Oh, I see. You're here to bitch, not to learn. The appropriate venue for this discussion is here.

I mean something like this. You can't compare Lilypond or others to Sibelius. It's just like me saying I use Adobe Photoshop for my profession, and someone replying to say, "Have you tried Mario Paint?"

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.......

Many years ago (1996?)... the Finn brothers wrote Sibelius for Acorn computers; it was (and probably still is in its latest guise) classical composing software in the world. Users bought Acorn Risc PCs solely for Sibelius. Now it runs on Mac and Windows and Acorn's RISC OS is almost forgotten.

Circa 1997, Sibelius was connected to a grand piano and played a formidably complex Liszt piece to an enraptured audience. God knows how many clever features it has now!

Part of the appeal of the program is that it does not play the notes at the exact time specified by the score but can play in various styles, playing with human-like timing.

What I'm really waiting for, though, is an option in both (or all) programs to save in some open file format. That would mean true victory for us music tech dorks, and longevity for our files.

I'm not very fluent reading and writing music, but sometimes I have to ;). A good alternative (better according to most "real" musicians/composers I know) is Sibelius. They have an OS X version and they even have a special price when you upgrade from Finale.

There's also Lilypond, a very good free (as in speech) software that you can get through Fink and use with Apple's X11 implementation. Personally that's what I use, and it gives me very nice scores.

I hope this helps!

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.

I'm a composer that's used Finale for almost 10 years. I love it and it's infinitely useable. It does have a bit of a learning curve though and for writing organ music it may be more powerful than you need. Sibelius would be a good alternative if you are looking for a quick piece of software to pick up and just use. It does have notational limitations that Finale does not have. Finale Sibelius

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!

finale is the other choice, but sibelius is much easier to use and learn - and in my experience is just as powerful. available for mac and windows.

i was a music composition major and ended up using sibelius for nearly everything i wrote - instrumental works, choral, whatever. it does have limited playback features too.

FWIW, I recently picked up a copy of Sibelius2 for OSX and I'm fairly happy with that. You might want to check it out. Information here

Classical music does use computers for composition. Many musicians use Sibelius software to write down their compositions.

True, a computer can never compare to a live performance, particularly as far as solo work is concerned. However some of the recent top British musicians have been working to produce purely synthesised classical music. As one whose father owns the main woodwind company and producer of oboes in the UK, (shameless plug for Howarths)I know that a top oboist, Malcolm Messiter, produced a totally synthesised orchestra "The Virtual Orchestra". My father brought the cd home one night and put it on. I merely thought it was an poor recording and performance on terrible instruments. We tested it out on everyone we had to dinner- nobody made comment and all were astounded that it was totally synthesised.

So computers can be used much more than you think in real "classical" music in addition to the obvious uses in popular music.

Yes, it is possible to output as MIDI, but this doesn't preserve any of the formatting and importing MIDI into Lilypond (and tidying up the resulting .ly files) is a time consuming business.

The product's website has a page where you can download and play some sibelius scores. But you have to install a plugin to do so, which is only availible for Windows. :\