Comments on: In Search of Open Source Notation Software

By: Teaching music technology to education students at DePaul : Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:01:12 +0000

[...] I set up for this class, I can’t help but recall a post I wrote a few years ago when I was a student in the very class that I’ll be teaching. This post [...]

By: Daryl Mussell

Daryl Mussell — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:22:03 +0000

There is an open source music notation program now available called MuseScore. It is a very well performing program at this point and a very good option for the uses detailed above.

http://musescore.org/

By: Stuart Brown

Stuart Brown — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:20:54 +0000

Has anyone tried running Finale in Ubuntu or Ubuntu Studio as a Wine or Cossover application? I’m not convinced that it works, but certainly it installs okay. My Window-based sequencer runs quite happily as a Wine application also.

By: Kat

Kat — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 23:36:35 +0000

Unfortunately, Finale NotePad is not available for Linux…and my guess is that it never will be…I doubt they will bother for a free piece of software.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:37:28 +0000

Canorus
http://canorus.berlios.de/

is the successor to NoteEdit
http://noteedit.berlios.de/

Both open-source graphical music notation authoring/editing apps. NoteEdit was Linux only, but Canorus will be cross-platform (Linux, Windows, OSX/Mac). It looks promising, but is still in Beta stage. It is designed to work closely with Lilypond. I’d be curious to see how it and Denemo stack up…

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:20:29 +0000

Sounds like a good option. I was only seeing a Windows version of SourceForge, though the documentation says that it’s cross-platform. I’ll dig around more and check it out.

By: Thomas Bonte

Thomas Bonte — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:55:05 +0000

I don't know whether 1,5 years after this post was published is 'sooner of later', but you should try out MuseScore, it's a free and open source music notation for windows and linux which is currently at release 0.9.3. Since it has a pretty advanced musicXML import/export on board, it's quite easy to start using MuseScore with your current scores.

By: links for 2008-07-13 « Nur mein Standpunkt

links for 2008-07-13 « Nur mein Standpunkt — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:32:27 +0000

[...] In Search of Open Source Notation Software Finale Notepad torpediert sich beim Starten bei mir selbst. Ts. Musescore ist frellig von der Bedienung her – und andere Alternativen sehe ich momentan nicht. Doof. (tags: Musik) [...]

By: jason hull

jason hull — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:23:54 +0000

hi everyone,

if you haven’t heard of it already this seems a good product although development has been over a long period of time now

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:57:00 +0000

The retail price for both Finale and Sibelius is around the $600 mark. Both programs can be obtained at an academic discount of around $200 if you shop around.

The audience for music notation software isn't really big enough to support major open source offerings. If you look at Finale and Sibelius, they aren't exactly bringing in a great deal of money despite having the great majority of the market.

As publishers start relying more on technology provided by the major music notation software companies for distribution of their music, it's going to become less and less feasible for them to jump to open source software.

Also keep in mind that the biggest segments of the notation software market are composers and educators/students - not engravers. Finale and Sibelius are successful because they include many advanced playback tools for composers and advanced educational tools (like SmartMusic) for teachers and students.