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 Notion 6
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.
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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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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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