[ANN] Seven Music Notation Programs

• May 20, 2016 - 01:53

About ten years ago a group of us decided to do a comparison of the most popular notation programs, to see how each program looked in print. Although one program's output can be made to look much like another's, some aspects of that are easier to do, and it’s interesting how the personality of the pages varies.

I mentioned this to Abraham Lee, a noted designer of music fonts, who replied:

> I couldn’t agree more! It really is amazing to see how each application embeds its own personality into the score’s appearance, beyond what is “correct” or not. Truly fascinating, indeed!

Although feature set and interface may be more important to some in the choice of an engraving program, this comparison was done for those especially interested in high quality publication.

Unsolicited comments on "Six Music Notation Programs" included “Absolutely amazing! . . . Interesting! . . . This is certainly a worth while endeavor . . . a really great idea and I’m glad that someone is taking the time to do it the right way . . . I love seeing how each program handles music.”

It's time for an update, both to include two new popular programs and to revise other programs' samples using the latest versions. So "Seven Music Notation Programs", with a one-page score for classical guitar as done in Finale, LilyPond, MuseScore, Notion, Overture, Score and Sibelius, is at:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64325719/Seven%20Music%20Notation%2…

Many thanks again to Nicholas Froment for his version in MuseScore.

Enjoy,
John R.


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