MuseScore: open source notation software
I’ve got an old Sibelius CD down in the warehouse, but I couldn’t be ar*ed to find and fetch, and it probably wouldn’t work on Vista anyway. So … I had a look around and installed MuseScore, a free, open source competitor for Finale Notepad (which incidentally now costs $10). David Bolton does a head-to-head here. It’s fine for my basic, barrel organ needs, and I found my way round the interface quickly. The big no, however, is that as far as I can see it doesn’t support MIDI keyboard input on Windows, meaning that writing with it would be way too slow. Other stuff: no undo, problems selecting notes/bars/…, cut/copy don’t appear to work, can’t find way of changing instrument output… One to watch - forums here.
Have you tried Fomus? I heard it was interesting a couple of years ago.
Doesn’t look like anything happened this year. I had a look at MuseScore 0.9.4, but MIDI input still doesn’t seem to work and quite a lot of other stuff seems freaky so with great regret I’ve got Notepad.
MIDI keyboard support for Windows is in the works for the next release of MuseScore as are improvements to copy-paste. MuseScore supports unlimited undo.
The undo feature doesn’t work on Windows for me. Looking forward to the MIDI support - that seems like crucial.