[Dixielandjazz] Music software

[Keith Garner]

Hi All

Andy Ling wrote
"The one I know of and use is Neuratron Photoscore. It is designed to work
with Sibelius, but will work with other scoring packages.

Results are variable. You have to start with a clearly printed score.
Handwritten is no good. You usually end up having to tweak a fair bit."


I agree with Andy about the results being variable, I found correcting the 
scanned result so much trouble that it relly wasn't worth the effort.

As I see it Sibelius and Finale are excellent programs if you are a 
professional arranger with a sophisticated hardware set up. The cut down 
vesion of Finale is "Finale Notepad" and this is available as freeware. A 
member of my band who is also a music teacher uses it with his students - 
being free they can all have it for themselves, entry is quick and it does 
things like transposition very straightforwardly. It does have a print 
facility which is adequate but it's formatting facilities are very limited.

I used it for a time but then changed to another free program - Musescore. I 
use it for producing lead sheets for the band but also as a quick way of 
transposing music. You can place notes using the mouse, but by far the 
quicker is simply to type the note length and name - I know the USA uses 
different names but to enter say a crotchet (quarter note?)  of C you type 
"5C" or a quaver (eighth note?) of C "4C". This is certainly very much 
quicker than correcting a scan. Chords and lyrics are equally simple to 
enter. Musescore plays the music back for you and transposition is just a 
matter of entering how many semitones up or down you want to transpose. It 
alters the key signature accordingly and also transposes the chord names. 
The print formatting seems better to me than that of Finale Notepad.

Hope this helps
Keith Garner
www.jazzpzazz.co.uk