Best Music Notation Software for Windows
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Compare the Top Music Notation Software for Windows as of June 2025
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What is Music Notation Software for Windows?
Music notation software, also known as music writing or music composition software, enables musicians to write and compose music on their computer or device. Compare and read user reviews of the best Music Notation software for Windows currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
PreSonus Notion 6
PreSonus Audio Electronics
Bring musical inspirations to life with the blazingly fast and intuitive Notion™ 6 music composition and performance environment. Compose when and how you want and even enter music with your own handwriting. Take projects to the next level with deep integration with Studio One®. Hear and perform music with gorgeous samples by the London Symphony Orchestra and others. Deliver polished scores faster than ever before, from complete film orchestrations to simple lead sheets and guitar tab. Whether you are an instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, arranger, music educator, or student, you’ll find Notion 6 to be the easiest-to-use and best-sounding notation software on the market today. Notion 6: Redefining music notation.Starting Price: $161.81 one-time payment -
2
Crescendo Music Notation
NCH Software
A simple and intuitive way to write musical notation or guitar tabs, Crescendo allows composers to write, save and print their music compositions on their computer. The wide array of sheet music symbols, time and key signatures, along with a free-form layout, gives a composer optimum control over creating sheet music for their arrangements. Add whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and rests (semibreve to demisemiquaver). Use drum kits and templates to write percussion notation. Create dotted notes, chords, add repeats, and more. Insert text to specify a title, tempo, dynamics or lyrics. Copy, cut and paste measures to easily insert themes. Brace staves together to compose scores for ensembles. Supports VSTi instruments, such as piano or violin, for quality MIDI playback.Starting Price: $39.95 one-time payment -
3
MuseScore
MuseScore
Step-time and real-time MIDI input, and a built-in virtual piano keyboard. Or type the notes in, or click with the mouse. Transpose a selected passage to any key, or by any interval—or even transpose diatonically within the same key. Multiple tab styles available—from note symbols outside the staff to upside-down strings—and linked standard/tab staff pairs. MuseScore can now open files from Guitar Pro, so you can easily migrate over. Import filters are improving with every release. Any change you make to the content of any part is immediately reflected in the full score—and vice versa. Instantly switch between transposed and concert pitch. Sounding pitches stay the same while the written notes change. Focus on the content, undistracted by line breaks or page breaks. Switch to Page View to polish up for printing. -
4
StaffPad
StaffPad
StaffPad is an award-winning music notation app, designed for pen and touch, and built for composers. StaffPad lets you effortlessly write music in your own handwriting, edit with the convenience of touch, and hear your score played back with breathtakingly realistic sounds. StaffPad Reader is made for musicians. It's a free app that connects to StaffPad, and displays the individual parts of a StaffPad Score, in real time, across multiple devices. Any changes made to the score in StaffPad update instantly on every connected Reader. Annotations and playback work in perfect sync, all you need is a simple Wi-Fi connection. Together, they form an extremely elegant, intuitive and powerful platform for composition and live performance. StaffPad's unique algorithms convert your handwritten notation into a beautifully typeset score. It'll even help you by automatically correcting your stem directions, adding courtesy accidentals and highlighting when there's too many, or too few, beats.Starting Price: $89.99 one-time payment -
5
Solfeg.io
Solfeg.io
Solfeg.io has created both a product for individual music learning & a product designed specially for teachers. App for schools: 👇 live, play-along music software and a lesson suite with many songs for teaching general music, theory, and instruments. Some of the features: ✅ Song library with the latest TikTok and Spotify songs you can play along 🎶 Quizzes for students 💻 Resources & Lesson Plans 📊 Student progress statistics Solfeg.io for self learning 👇 play-along app that helps people relax whilst learning to hit songs that they known and can associate with on ukulele, piano or guitar. Features: Song library with the latest TikTok and Spotify songs 🎧 A tuner (guitar and ukulele) ✅ Chord recognition Instant feedback👂 TABS 🎼 Guided video tutorials ▶️ Weekly exercises ✨ Progress trackingStarting Price: $5.99 per user per month -
6
QuickScore Elite
QuickScore Elite
QuickScore Elite is comprehensive, integrated software for music composition, incorporating notation, arranging, MIDI and audio sequencing and recording. Create publication-quality scores, musical content for the desktop and world wide web, audio CDs, MP3s and soundtracks for film, video and games. QuickScore Elite Level II is Sion Software's premier software for composing music, an elegant, integrated scoring, audio and sequencing program that Electronic Magazine awarded their 1998 Editors' Choice for notation software upon its debut and has won the Top Ten Reviews Gold Award for five years running. Start faster right off the top with one of QuickScore's score templates. You've got Piano, Piano and Solo Instrument, Organ, Choir, Band, Orchestra and a bunch more. And if you need something you don't see, just set it up yourself and it's there for you to use from then on. Play high quality instrument sounds with the included FluidGM soundfont player.Starting Price: $179.95 one-time payment -
7
ScoreCloud
ScoreCloud
ScoreCloud instantly turns your songs into sheet music. As simple as that! Transcribe any polyphonic or monophonic instrument live recording into sheet music. Notating music has never been easier. Music notation software ideal for musicians, students, teachers, choirs and bands as well as composers and arrangers, free to download. Sheet music from playing, sync across all devices, intuitive editing. No print watermark, unlimited songs, more import & export. ScoreCloud 4 for PC & Mac is completely free to download so you can get started right away, with notation from audio and cloud sync. For the paid plans, we offer a free trial that gives full access to all advanced features when signing up for any plan! You can also connect a MIDI keyboard and play, or use the virtual piano to play on your computer keyboard. Click around and use the tools in the toolbar to edit the song, add voices, lyrics and chords.Starting Price: $4.99 per month -
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NotePerformer
NotePerformer
NotePerformer includes its own sounds, encompassing a large-scale modern symphonic orchestra. NotePerformer analyses your score and performs all instruments with natural musical phrasing. NotePerformer is very easy to install, and is no more difficult to use than the built-in sounds of your notation software. We aim for our software to be more rewarding to work with than any other solution for playback. If you experience issues, please let us know your thoughts. No more waiting for samples to load while working with scores. Our streamlined sounds load much quicker. We use our own in-house technologies, bridging the gap between samples and synthesis. Use NotePerformer on as many computers as you like. Between which you need to restart your notation software. Perfect for business staff, studios or classrooms. For use by multiple people on a single site. Starts at $200 for 1-5 seats, and you can mix Mac and PC stations. Get high-quality playback in Sibelius, Finale & Dorico.Starting Price: $10.75 per month -
9
MagicScore Maestro
Maestro Music Soft
MagicScore Maestro 8 allows you to turn your musical ideas into clean, playable, and easy to read music notation files by using one of the most powerful and customizable music scoring systems on the market today. With MagicScore Maestro you can create clean, engraver quality prints of your music with a minimum of effort and time. You also get all of the features found in our Maestro Notation program, plus the ability to have total musical control over every single note in the entire composition. When the creative mood hits or a deadline looms you want to be able to get your musical ideas down quickly, easily, and accurately with many different presentation options. MagicScore Maestro provides all of these things within a set of features that rivals all other professional level music notation and composition products.Starting Price: $6.99 one-time payment -
10
MagicScore Guitar
Maestro Music Soft
MagicScore Guitar 8 offers everything you need as a guitar player. Whether you are seasoned professional, music teacher or just a learning beginner, MagicScore Guitar will bring the full power of a highly sophisticated tab editing and music notation software right to your fingertips. This powerful and user-friendly solution allows you to quickly compose songs by laying them out along with tabs and notes. You can use it for creating arrangements or for advancing to the next level of your performance skills. There are built-in features for helping you share your tabs and notes, training tools allowing you to practice a song, as well as teaching tools to help newbies learn how to play the guitar. MagicScore Guitar is extremely versatile and easy to use, providing the full range of features that amateur and professional guitar players alike can put to good use.Starting Price: $39.95 one-time payment -
11
OneTouch Composer
Maestro Music Soft
MagicScore OneTouch Composer is the first music notation software for Windows tablets all over the World. Compose music with OneTouch Composer – the best software for Windows 8 tablets due to Intel Application Innovation Contest. OneTouch Composer was developed on the basis of the popular music notation software – MagicScore Maestro. It was declared the world’s best music notation software due to most popular independent review by TopTenReviews. OneTouch Composer is the best solution for almost any musicians, from amateurs and students to teachers and composers. The program includes the most demanded features of MagicScore Maestro. Moreover, OneTouch Composer is a very easy and extremely comfortable in use.Starting Price: $39.95 one-time payment -
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MagicScore Notation
Maestro Music Soft
MagicScore Notation for MS Word 8 combines all of the power and features of the MagicScore Notation software with the convenience of being able to dynamically place music notation into any MS Word document with a single mouse click. The downfall of most music notation programs is that in order to place a score into a word processing document the user must paste an image of the score into it. Once it is there the notes cannot be changed without deleting it and starting over. MagicScore Notation for Microsoft Word solves this problem by allowing you to edit the notes on the page simply by clicking on them from within the word processor itself. With our software there is no need for copying and pasting image files. To add a piece of music notation to a MS Word document all a user has to do is place a MagicScore Notation object add-in into the document using a toolbar button or the Insert->Object menu inside of Word.Starting Price: $69.95 one-time payment -
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DeluxeNote
DeluxeNote
Enjoy creating sheet music in a very natural way with this music notation software, scorewriter, for Windows. Feel its innovative user experience to painlessly benefit from computer-aided notation. Zoom in the notes you want to edit, just like you approach the paper when you handwrite music. Zoom in a single measure, a system, a page, the whole workspace, in one click! Need to scroll? Use the wheels on the bottom-right corner to easily scroll in both directions. Spread sheet music on an unlimited workspace. Sketch your ideas out of the page layout. Easily access the spreaded scores and its parts. Edit most of the aspects of the selected elements. Available actions for the current selection. Get what you need in less the time it takes choosing a template. Return back and forward as many times as you need. Left-right selects any kind of element, right-left only notes. Lots of them to discover as you get familiar to DeluxeNote.Starting Price: $19.99 one-time payment -
14
Denemo
Denemo
Denemo is a free music notation program for GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows that lets you rapidly enter notation which it typesets using the LilyPond music engraver. Music can be typed in at the PC-Keyboard, or played in via MIDI controller, or input acoustically into a microphone plugged into your computer’s soundcard. Denemo uses LilyPond which generates beautiful sheet music to the highest publishing standards. During input Denemo displays the staffs in a simple fashion, so you can enter and edit the music efficiently. The typesetting is done in the background while you work, and is generally flawless publication quality. Some final tweaks can be done on the typeset score with the mouse if needed. This represents an enormous practical improvement over the popular programs which require you to re-position colliding notation constantly as you enter the music. See comparison with Musescore, Finale or Sibelius. -
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PreSonus Sphere
PreSonus Audio Electronics
You also get a library of master class videos, collaboration tools, monthly live streams, exclusive Studio One features, industry veteran-authored presets, and tons of loop and construction kit content—and we’re constantly adding more, month after month after month. No hidden fees. No additional upgrade costs. All in PreSonus Sphere. A PreSonus Sphere membership includes a license for award-winning Studio One Professional–the only DAW that lets you record, produce, mix, master, and perform from within a single application. Go from creative concept to final mastered album—even use stems from your songs as backing tracks for your live performance—all from Studio One. PreSonus Sphere is the ultimate toolkit for the modern composer. From simple lead sheets to complete orchestrations, you’ll deliver polished scores fast with award-winning Notion® software.Starting Price: $14.95 per month -
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Finale
Finale Music
Capture musical inspiration. Engrave a beautiful score. Share your artistic vision with others. Just as every musician is unique, so are the reasons each uses Finale software to write music. Finale supports you, making it easy to create whatever music notation you can imagine and to work in the manner that best supports your creativity. No matter where your inspiration leads you, from a simple lead sheet to preparing your Hollywood film score, Finale is the trusted route to the very best output available. Finale offers you the freedom both of what you create and how you create it. Whether you’re imagining a simple lead sheet, a Broadway score, or something truly unorthodox, you enjoy the flexibility to make your music any way you wish, and to make it in the order and manner that best supports your inspiration. Entering your music in Finale sets you free. In an instant you can move measures, change keys, and transform your music in countless ways. -
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Anvil Studio
Anvil Studio
Anvil Studio ™ is a free Windows 10 / 8.x / 7 Program designed for people who want to: record music with MIDI and Audio equipment, compose music for MIDI and Audio equipment, sequence music with MIDI equipment. play with music using a computer and print sheet music from standard MIDI files with the optional Print-Sheet accessory. With the free version, you can create an unlimited number of MIDI tracks, and two one-minute audio tracks. With the optional Multi-Audio 1/8 accessory, each song you create can have up to eight audio tracks of unlimited length. With the optional Multi-Audio 8/16 accessory, each song you create can have up to 16 audio tracks of unlimited length, and you can record up to 8 audio tracks simultaneously if you have enough audio input ports.Starting Price: $99 one-time payment -
18
MC Musiceditor
MC Musiceditor
MC Musiceditor is free/open source (GPLv2 or above) music notation software. The two flavours, MCMusiceditor (full version) and MCMusiceditor-Lite, are made for Windows (XP and above). In addition, MCMusiceditor-Lite runs also fine on Linux (under Wine). MC Musiceditor is developed by Reinier Maliepaard, psychologist, software engineer, musician and teacher at the ArtEZ Conservatorium Netherlands (music theory and music history). Why? To make life of musicians easier when making scores. This resulted in a userfriendly editor which makes professional scores without requiring specific knowledge (other than musical basics)! MC Musiceditor is the easiest way to write, refine, hear and print professional scores. In addition: MC Musiceditor can share and interchange musical notation data of MC Musiceditor with WYSIWYG music notation editors like MuseScore, Finale and Sibelius (to mention only the most popular programs by my students). -
19
Musink
Musink
Musink is a free music-composition software package that will change the way you write music. Compose snippets, scores, books, and MIDI files; export your sheet-music for the Web; notate quickly; never worry about page layouts ever again. Musink lets you focus on writing, and takes care of the hard work for you. Musink Lite is free and used by thousands of composers every day. Musink Pro boasts professional features over and above those of Musink Lite. Musink comes in two flavours. Musink Lite is free. Musink Pro has a richer feature set that makes it better suited to serious projects, hobbyists, teachers, and composers. Musink is a music composition application that will change the way you write music. Musink Lite is free to download. Musink Pro is a fully featured version of Musink that lets you do more with your MIDI keyboard, write faster, and provides ultimate control over your published scores.Starting Price: $60 one-time payment -
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LilyPond
LilyPond
LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts. LilyPond is free software and part of the GNU Project. LilyPond is a powerful and flexible tool for engraving tasks of all kinds, for example classical music, complex notation, early music, modern music, tablature, vocal music, lead sheets, educational materials, large orchestral projects, customized output, and even Schenker graphs. LilyPond came about when two musicians wanted to go beyond the soulless look of computer-printed sheet music. Musicians prefer reading beautiful music, so why couldn’t programmers write software to produce elegant printed parts? The result is a program that creates beautiful sheet music following the best traditions of classical music engraving. It takes care of the details of layout programmatically, allowing composers, transcribers and publishers to focus on the music. -
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Pizzicato
Arpege Music Software Development
Pizzicato is a range of 11 software and we can add two additional software: Harmony and Counterpoint, Alternative Notation. Pizzicato Professional contains every function you can find in the 10 other versions described on that page, which contain only a specific set of these functions, oriented around a more specific use of Pizzicato. Pizzicato Professional offers a multitude of additional functions and possibilities, compared to the Beginner version for example. Among others, it contains a whole set of innovative and intuitive tools to help compose your own music. It opens the door of music composition to everyone, even with little or no music knowledge. The tools and options of this version give you a very powerful score editor as well as many tools to refine the interpretation of a score in MIDI, as well as many tools to practice music composition. -
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MagicScore SongWriter
Maestro Music Soft
MagicScore SongWriter is an ideal software that works with song as well as instrumental material. The program is designed for songwriters, singers, choirs, students, and amateur musicians. Using MagicScore SongWriter, you can easily pass all the stages of writing a song, from the sketch of a melody, chords, and lyrics, up to publishing and printing. It is equally easy in writing down and editing solo and accompaniment parts. Multitude of convenient instruments that provide a comfortable work with sheet music and digital materials; these include templates of song forms, ensemble templates. The program has all the editors, necessary for easy typesetting of lyrics, and fine tuning of sound. MagicScore SongWriter is a new and the most innovative program in the MagicScore product line.Starting Price: $29.95 one-time payment
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