Question

I'm taking a music composition course and it's highly recommended we grab some software for music composition, the two most popular being Sibelius and Finale. They aren't overly pricey, as both have student versions, but I was wondering if anyone knew of some good free music composition programs.

Thanks

Answer 1

Check out MuseScore http://www.musescore.org/

Its terrific and open source.

Still in Beta, but very useful.

EDIT: As Open Source implies, this is a collaborative effort. It has a fantastic group of developers and wonderful support. It is being translated into many, many languages and is available for Linux and Mac.

Highly recommended.

(I am not a part of this product except as a user).

Answer 2

There's also Lilypond, which is to Finale/Sibelius what Latex is to Microsoft Word - you write music in a text file as a series of notes and run it through the Lilypond processor which converts it to a PDF & MIDI file. It's now quite mature and produces beautiful music.

Answer 3

If your requirements are moderate, maybe NoteFlight is for you - it's a free online music notation editor.

Answer 4

I highly recommend using LilyPond, but with an auxiliary editor that makes editing more convenient (a little bit closer to WYSIWYG):

• LilyPondTool for jEdit (mature with great features such as two-way point-and-click and tweaking with mouse)
• Elysium for Eclipse (very pre-alpha but with the added value of Eclipse)