Caveats for Finale Notepad: This is a very very pared-down version of finale. That means that you get all the problems without the facilities to fix them (spider-thin staff lines and barlines, which are more than an annoyance to folk with less-than-perfect vision, including us older folk) and the limitations can be stultifying.
You cannot change keysignature once it has been established. (that alone is stuldtifying!) Tablature is 'standard guitar and bass', and doesn't include 5- or 6- string bass (which may not be a problem) Time signatures are limited, and may or not be changeable within one score now. When I last tried it, you couldn't. Only one verse of lyrics. There are other limitations which are not obvious until you need them: the FinaleMusic folk are good at telling you what features are included, and very good at avoiding mentioning what you probably need and don't get. Free is an odd term: you invariably pay, either by giving up what you need, spending time finding workarounds for what you can't do without, or taking 11 times longer to do what you need to do quickly. If you have access to a student version of Finale or Sibelius (worth taking a course or two at a local community college, even) you can get them for about a quarter of what you'd pay, and the feature set rises to the 'usable' level. For free, Notepad (at least for me) has always been too expensive. Notepad is good for just what is stated: an introduction to Finale, a way to 'jot' musical ideas, and a way to set the simplest of music into notation. This is a philosophy of dichotomy, by the way, between the "WYSIWYG"=What you see is what you get and "WYSIAYG"="What you see is all you get", the binary attitude towards visual music editors, and the "WYLTDIWYG"=What you learn to do is what you get and "WYGOOTBISWYSW" = what you get out-of-the-box is what you're stuck with. Finale and Sibelius straddle WYSIWYG and WYGOOTBISWYSW: you can pay an expert to provide you with what you actually want, or spend your life becoming that expert. Lilypond and abc straddle the latter: you don't get the immediate visual feedback of a GUI, but you can get to the guts (at least of Lilypond) more easily, and you can donate money to fund the establishment of features which aren't provided with Lilypond, if you are so inclined. (I don't know of a big-corporation WYSIWYG notation editor where you can directly influence the program like you can with Lily: the corporations do what they think is going to sell the most copies. The Lilypond guys are more concerned with doing what is wanted, as long as they get to eat as well.) I will disclaim: I am in the "everything from the keyboard" school, so I find Lilypond delightful. There are things you can't do in Lilypond, but if you want Broude-Brothers quality scores and parts with a minimum of learning curve, it's a best-buy, being really free. Learning to input doesn't take that long, and a proper setup (which you get in the standard install) gives you quick-enough feedback, by simply learning to enter music in manageable pieces (so you aren't leaving something open that will choke the compiler) and compiling and displaying often. For lilypond on windows, you used to have to install Ghostscript separately, and it seems to now all come as one piece. lilypond.org is a good place to visit. Ray On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 4:32 AM, <denyssteph...@ukonline.co.uk> wrote: > Dear Martyn, > There is a simplified free version of Finale called 'Notepad' > which is worth trying - see www.finalemusic.com > > Best wishes, > > Denys > To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
