sound expanse

First of all, thank you for responding! There have been over 50 responses so far. I’m no statistician, but I think there are some interesting results here. The infographic below includes the responses as of this evening. If you’d like to see the full, updated results directly, take a look through this sortable table.

Here are some of my early observations.

1) Sibelius is more popular than I thought, and if it’s not supported in the future that will shake things up significantly. Finale is less popular than I thought. Both have a fairly mixed satisfaction level.

2) The Adobe Creative Suite is in wider use than I knew, and users seem to be happy with it. I’m sure it helps that its development is sustained by a much wider market than our niche.

3) Almost 1/3rd of respondents have landed on an option that doesn’t require a major purchase. (I wish I were one of them.)

4) Most people have tried a couple of options but settled on one.

5) I need to do a more refined poll. (If I’m honest, I put this poll in at the last moment, when I saw how I was rambling on and needed to break up the text somehow.) I’ll probably put that poll up in a couple of weeks, so let me know if you have any burning questions for the community.

Since my original post, I’ve learned about several other pieces of software, both through comments to me and in the article and comments on this very helpful NewMusicBox post. More on that later.

Since writing yesterday, I’ve learned of two other pieces of notation software that are, I’m reliably told, well worth consideration.

1) NoteAbility Pro “combines both musical intelligence and graphical flexibility in a direct and intuitive graphical user interface.” I’ve heard that people have made some beautiful scores with it. I’d love to see an example. In briefly looking over the screenshots, one standout feature that distinguishes it, as far as I know, from Finale and Sibelius is that it’s very easy to apply different colors to any element on the page. It costs $225 CAD (Canadian dollars), but as with the other options, you can try it out for free.

I followed a link on the company site to NoteWriter and got very excited when I read that it “treats music images as graphics, so that any image can be placed anywhere on the page.” But then I was quickly disappointed to learn that it’s not compatible with Intel-based macs. I have an old laptop lying around, but it closes diagonally and doesn’t hold a charge for over 2 minutes.

2) MuseScore is cross-platform and free. I’m told that it is “missing some more advanced features but is definitely worth a look,” depending on the complexity of your notation practice. Again, I’d love to see some examples.

I’ve been surprised and pleased by the poll responses so far. I’m hoping to get about 10 more before sharing the results.