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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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.
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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).
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Sibelius
Your musicality and imagination are limitless. Turn your musical vision into compelling scores that move audiences—from the stage or screen—with Sibelius. Sibelius is always getting better with new features and improvements. And with your active plan, you get them as soon as we release them. Take the stress out of collaborating with non-Sibelius composers. With a single click, Sibelius transforms MusicXML files into beautifully formatted scores without any manual work. You can import score data directly into your go-to template or into a new Sibelius file. All notation, markup, and layout details are automatically and intelligently assigned, so you can start immediately and spend more time on the music—not toiling away conforming elements to a template. From concert halls to scoring stages, more composers, arrangers, copyists, and engravers use Sibelius than any other tool. It’s the fastest, smartest way to write music.
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