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Music Software Programs |
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Peter Parshall, Music Development Officer, Christ Church Cathedral
A chance remark made while leading a workshop at last August's Charles Wood Summer School in Armagh, led the Editor to ask me to contribute this article to SOUNDBOARD. I had said (as one tends to when emphasising a point) that there are hundreds of music software packages on the market. Whilst this assertion is not strictly true, there are a bewilderingly large number available and it can be difficult to distinguish between them in terms of their quality and user-friendliness. What I have done in this article is to provide an overview and evaluation, according to a strict set of criteria, of four of the most popular packages. I have been most ably assisted in this process by my colleagues in the Music Department at the Cathedral, and I thank them for this.
Process
The basis on which we completed the project was to each take a program we'd never used before, download a trial version of it and then use it to input the melody line of a hymn tune. The criteria on which the programmes were evaluated are listed below:
Criteria and grading
1–10 (1 = very poor; 10 = excellent)
a. Ease and speed of installation
b. Ease of use
c. Quality of the finished product
d. Value for money
The programs chosen were Encore, Finale, Noteworthy and Mozart. I left out Sibelius simply because at over €600 it's just too expensive to be a realistic option. The following evaluation process was adopted and each person was allowed no more than 30 minutes to complete it.
1. The evaluation files were downloaded from the Internet
2. The melody line of the tune Song 34 (Church Hymnal 567) and the words of the first verse were typed in.
3. The finished product was exported into a Word file (as one would do if one were creating a Sunday service sheet, for example)
NOTEWORTHY COMPOSER
Evaluation 1.75b.2
http://www.noteworthysoftware.com/
Overall score 6/10
Evaluated by Fraser Wilson
a] 9/10 The download process was perfectly quick and easy with no restart required, and a friendly interface.
b] 7/10 I found the odd counter-intuitive feature but mainly straightforward enough.
c] 6/10 A slightly dated interface, some limited options (e.g., the shortcut keys cannot be changed).
d] 8/10 Compare with, for example, Sibelius at more than ten times the cost.
The program was downloaded and installed without difficulty. When first starting it, the massed icons across the top of the screen were rather disconcerting (especially compared to Sibelius, which is just so neat and compact). The presentation harks back to a bygone age, but in a way this no-frills style is quite endearing. Notation input turned out to be remarkably easy, notwithstanding the occasional oddity (an accidental has to be specified before the note is inserted, for example, otherwise you have to delete and start again). The shortcut keys aren't desperately logical, and as far as I can see they can't be changed. The lyric editor is quaintly original—you have to enter the whole text in a separate window (separating individual syllables with hyphens) before seeing the results on the staff—this is actually not as unpleasant as it sounds and the mistakes that I made could be quickly corrected. The process of inputting the hymn tune and words was complete in under twenty minutes. Unfortunately I wasn't able to export it to my service sheet—you have to buy the licence for that—so instead I copied one of the supplied files (a piece of Mozart) and it looks fine in Word (and involved a very simple two-click procedure). A licence for the full product costs $39 (€30.75), which compares very favourably with the cost of a copy of Sibelius.
ENCORE
Version 4.5.5 Evaluation download.
Overall score 5/10
Evaluation by Tristan Russcher
a]8 /10. The program was easy to install, although the web site sends you an e-mail which contains a link to the demonstration software. This e-mail took about two minutes to come through to my inbox. Installation was quite quick, taking about two minutes, although the download altered the Windows registry.
b] 6/10. I found the program fairly easy to use. Inputting notes simply involves clicking on a duration in the note box and then clicking on the stave to place the note. The same process applies to rests. I couldn't find a function for irregular bar lengths and so in this case, I had to have the first bar in 10/4 and bars two to four in 12/4 (hiding the time signatures). I had a good deal of trouble with the eraser function and had to re-enter bar two. It took me a little time to find the text box function so that I could input the words of the hymn, but once I had grasped the idea that there are a number of floating toolbars that can be switched on or off, the actual process of inputting the text wasn't a problem. Unfortunately, there are no pop-up bubbles hiding underneath the toolbar buttons, so it wasn't easy to work out what they all did. A little more time would have proved useful in this respect.
c] N/A. The demonstration closed after twenty five minutes and took me straight back to Windows taking all my work with it. This feature was not made clear when I downloaded the program and I don't think that this is a particularly good method to employ. Other evaluation packages don't do this; they simply remove the Save and Print functions, or the finished product has evaluation watermarks on it when you print it out. Twenty five minutes is not long enough to get to grips with a program like this.
d] 2/10. I don't think that this programme offers value for money. The full version (which can be downloaded) costs $399.99 (€315.38), and I think that the user interface should be much better for this price.
MOZART
Overall score 7/10
Evaluated by Peter Parshall
a] 10/10. No problems here at all. The process was excellent and quick.
b] 6/10. I found that the process of inputting notes was fine. However, this is one of those programmes that insists that one needs a time signature. I ended up inputting the melody in 11/1, which seemed a little counter-intuitive, and then I couldn't work either out how to hide the time signature, nor the extra barline that the program had added for me.
c] 8/10 This process was fine and easy enough to carry out. However the results are a little fuzzy and there might be a better way of exporting the file rather than 'cut and paste'. Perhaps saving the file as a JPEG and then inserting it into your service sheet as a picture file, would allow better results.
d] 9/10. At €119.95 (including post & packing), it's not a prohibitively expensive program. It can be ordered and paid for securely on line or separately by post.
FINALE ALLEGRO.
Overall score 0/10
Evaluated by Judy Martin
Finally, a tale of disaster….
This took me ten minutes to download, and that was after I had to create an account. When I finally reached the Demo, there were no instructions at all. Pressing the Help button led to the response “not available with demo” each time. So, I thought I would be able, at least, to do something. I managed to type in the title and composer, and thought I had chosen a key signature and time signature. However, they didn't appear on the score. I then clicked on the Minim key and tried to input a minim on the stave. This just gave me bar lines. After frantic clicking, I found a Lyric key, and typed in some words. As there were no notes under which to put the words, this wasn't very productive.
That was it—my 30 minutes were over. I would say that this system appears very difficult to use, takes a long time to download, and isn't very helpful. It was a waste of 30 minutes!
Summary
And there you have it! In our opinion, the best of the programmes we tried were Noteworthy Composer and Mozart. Don't just take our word for it though! If you have access to the Internet, why not type “music notation programmes” into a search engine (Google, for example). You will find a dazzling array of products out there, most of them promising to have you producing professional scores in a matter of minutes. It costs nothing to download a trial version and to have a go. Because most of the available programs have this facility, it is an excellent way in which to 'try before you buy'.
Peter Parshall
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Last Modified 3/9/07 10:42 PM