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Music Software for Mac OS X?
tengwar writes "I'm an organist, and I sometimes have to prepare sheet music. I'd also like to do a bit of composition. I'm looking for music software for the Mac centered around standard notation. Playback would be nice, but it's not as important as a user interface that doesn't get in the way of plonking down notes on a stave fast enough for me to remember what I was trying to do. If possible I'd like something that will allow me to add the words for voice parts for hymns. Any advice?"
Finale by Coda Software.
www.finalemusic.com
I live and die by it. Albeit on a PC but I they offer a Mac version.
~foooo
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.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
sibelius.com
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.
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You should definitely check out Harmony Assistant. It's made by Myriad Software (http://www.myriad-online.com/enindex.htm). It's a little rough around the edges, but it does everything.
I switched to it from Sibelius/Finale when they took too long to come out with a mac os x version (and charged too much when they did). Harmony Assistant is only $65, and they provide a reasonably crippled demo.
They also make a plugin (that comes as a free trial with the software) called Virtual Singer that uses Text-to-Speech to give you an approximation of how a vocal piece will sound (kinda scary, but good for hearing what you're doing before you put it in front of a chorus)...
There's also support for a million different kinds of tablature, all the usual staves and so forth. Like I said, it's a little rough around the edges, but a $65 price tag (compared to $600 for sibelius or finale) makes it all worth it.
have you been seen on slash?
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.
Funny you should ask, as this showed up in Fink Stable today:
lilypond 1.6.10-2 (GNU Music Typesetter)
LilyPond prints beautiful sheet music. It produces music notation from a description file. It excels at typesetting classical music, but you can also print pop-songs. LilyPond input is plain text. So, you can use your favorite text editor to enter it, you can put it in mail or embed it in an article like this: \key c \minor r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 Or you can use it to print music from other programs, using one of the numerous input filters. LilyPond output looks beautiful. The font and the layout algorithms were inspired by engraved music, so you can expect that same clear and elegant look from your LilyPond output. And if anything is not to your liking, you can tweak almost everything. [Fink Packages (Stable)]
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
It is OSX Native, and works very well:
http://www.intuem.com/
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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!
Check out
http://www.osxaudio.com and
http://www.macmusic.org
two sites/communities for everything you could possibly want to know about Mac OS X audio software.
Alex.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Logic Audio. I don't know if they have a demo though. Apple owns them now. You might want to check out soundtrack it is supposed to be based on logic and might do the scoring also. It can be difficult to learn logic initially but it is a very powerful program. Make sure you get Logic Audio not Gold or platinum. For now Audio will do what you want and it doesn't cost $600. I think straight audio should be less than $200.
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You want Lilypond, a Free sheet music program. We just released version 1.8. You write an input file as a text file, then run Lilypond on the input file (similar to programming). Once you learn the format, it's faster than graphical mousing to enter the notes.
http://lilypond.org
Also available from fink. http://fink.sourceforge.net
Lilypond runs on GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOS, and other *nixs. It produces sheet music that looks better than Finale, but it is Free software.
Cheers,
- Graham
Full featured WYSIWYG notation software:
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, and have to say that Sibelius (www.sibelius.com) is my top choice overall. I used Finale (www.finalemusic.com) for years, and only switched because I had to learn Sibelius in order to teach it and absolutely fell in love with it. It's powerful, graceful, not too difficult to use (although, like Finale, more advanced features are a bit more complicated), and VERY importantly, Mac OS X native (I don't use non-native software. Those who haven't been able to update their software within the past 2.5 years don't deserve my business).
.EPS files), with minimal cleanup to do.
What's more, Sibelius is fast becoming a co-industry-standard format along with Finale, so publishers, competitions, other composers, etc. etc., will more than likely be able to access any files you need to send them. It also converts Finale files rather well (when saved as
It's all about the best tool for the job, and as far as the professional music community is concerned, it's either Finale or Sibelius. Both are good, Finale is not OS X native (though they promise to be in version 2004), and Sibelius is excellent, so I chose Sibelius.
A word of warning, however: Sibelius is have some kind of MIDI playback problem with Quicktime MIDI in 10.2.4+ which has not been remedied. Using an external MIDI device clears it up completely, but if you're relying on Quicktime built-in MIDI, stay at 10.2.3 or below (including 10.1.x)...
*plink,plink*
To reign is to serve.
I'm a composer/arranger, and I would be at a loss without Sibelius. I used to use Finale, but I switched over because I was sick of having to reboot to OS 9 to write my music. I haven't looked back since.
It costs $599 full price, but for educational and/or religious organization users the educational price is good, and if you shop around a bit, you can get it even cheaper (I found my copy for $170).
Hope this helps!
-raejae
(btw... anybody know if I can change my username to get rid of the nasty caps? Stupid young me...)
While Logic itself can have a bit of a steep learning curve, there are now brilliant books and active, friendly mailing lists available to help you out. And the notation part of the program has always been pretty intuitive. Plus, as an organ player, you might appreciate that Logic has what I feel is the best B3 plug in ever made (Logic comes with a 30 day demo of this, and all its virtual instruments for you to mess around with). And if, down the road, you decide you want to take your notating to the next level and produce/mix/record/arrange/whatever, Logic will be able to take you there.
There are three different versions of Logic,
They differ mostly in how many audio tracks you can arrange with, what DSP effects ship with each one, and other minor stuff like being able to draw automation curves. Feature comparison charts are available. For what you describe, you would need nothing more than Logic Audio, but the upgrade path to Gold and Platinum is clear and affordable should you decide you need more later on.
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