[ANN] Ten Music Notation Programs, second edition

• Jul 16, 2017 - 19:32

This document presents a one-page score as engraved by ten of the most popular music notation programs: Dorico, Encore, Finale, LilyPond, MuseScore, Music Press, Notion, Overture, Score, and Sibelius. Although all of these applications feature extensive flexibility and offer high quality engraving, each has its own personality, and comparison may be helpful to the musician or engraver making a choice among them.

Unsolicited comments about earlier versions of this document include:

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 . . . I don't think I've ever seen a lineup of professionally engraved scores like this before. It's a great idea. I must say, I find it very encouraging that there is still a large element of personality to be found in every one of the engravings, despite the nature of computers. Long may that continue! . . . Very interesting indeed to see the subtle differences in the notation and how the eye perceives it for clarity . . . Nice work! . . . Thank you so much! . . . This is wonderful!

This second edition includes revisions to the samples done in Dorico (version 1.1, engraved by Daniel Spreadbury) and Notion (version 6.2).

Free at:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/84he2sb57x8bw83/Ten%20Music%20Notation%20Prog…

John R.


Comments

This is great, thanks for continuing this work!

One question - the first page is Dorico? It doesn't seem to be identified as such. And the box identifying the Notion version seems misplaced (upside down and towards the bottom of the page). At least that's how it looks viewing in Chrome.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

The first page is Dorico, yes, and the Notion label was placed in the correct position (and every page was labeled) when I created the document in Adobe Acrobat 8 on Mac OS 10.6.8. I have no idea why the exceptions you point out are there -- I see them too when opening the link in Chrome.

In any case, everything looks right (and better, and prints better) when you download the file and open it in Adobe Reader or another standalone PDF viewer.

Sorry for the difficulties,
John R.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.