David Fenton wrote:
"You used the term "workstation" repeatedly throughout your post, yet
I don't understand what you mean by it. A workstation is a powerful
computer, to me, but that meaning doesn't fit into your usage very
well."
A workstation, in this context, is a comprehensive program for sequencing,
mixing, sampling, rendering audio files and— in these cases — notating.
One might well argue that Finale and Sibelius are now, effectively,
workstations, but their strengths continue to be in notation over audio
file production, while the programs I have identified here as workstations
(i.e. Rosegarden, Harmony Assistant, Notion) tend to be much stronger for
audio than for notation.
"FWIW, while I value your listing of all the programs, I have to say
that the scores I've downloaded from the various free score websites
that have been created in many of these are quite substandard
notationally. This may very well be because the creators of the
scores are inept or inexperienced, but when I see it it makes me
think the programs themselves are not very well-designed."
Many of these programs have significant limitations, and I do find it
shocking that most of them do not put the best examples of their work out
there. (MakeMusic could certainly push Finale better with examples by
some of the engravers from this list!) But my interest here is in a
diversity of products, many of them with niche strengths. Turandot, for
example, is not able to do a lot of new music notation, but it can produce
a good local notational style (very close to that of Editio Music
Budapest) right out of the box; similarly, it's not surprising to see
that Berlioz (now a free product) does a good job with Debussy (see here:
http://www.berlioz.tm.fr/exemples.html ; some of the slurs are very
good). For all of its limitations, Lime is, as far as I can tell, the
only program which handles non-alligned metres out of the box, and only it
and Harmony Assistant can assign specific pitchbends to each note and
accidental combination via a table or rule, respectively. MuseScore has
very nice output and would be a good alternative for students to a lite
version of Finale, albeit an alternative which does not lead the student
directly to Finale (one hopes that the developers will continue to
increase MuseScore's capacity). LilyPond is probably the program which is
most committed to the concept of a "classical" engraving style, which it
does well, if at the cost of flexibility and without a WYSIWYG editor
(this essay comparing Finale and LilyPond is useful:
http://www.musicbyandrew.ca/finale-lilypond-1.html ).
My experience does differ from yours in one respect: I find the output of
the three free programs I've mentioned here (Berlioz, MuseScore and
LilyPond) to be superior to most of the less expensive programs (Mozart,
Igor, Capella).
Daniel Wolf
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