Instant chant engraving with Gregorio

I use Sibelius, and if you or your parish has no problem fronting the money for it, it's well worth it, especially if making worship aids is your primary objective. I was a long-time Finale user, and when I finally sprung for Sibelius, I was blown away by how intuitive the controls were. Also, the "help" index is remarkably easy to use and reference more complicated functions, so if you're starting with little or no knowledge it's very user-friendly.

I have no idea on the chant engraving capability; I've never tried except just to delete barlines and use stemless notes on a modern staff. I'm pretty sure neumes are not a stock font set.

Since I use Finale day in and day out, it's not a problem for me, and I do have many finer points of music engraving to worry about. Consequently, I've been somewhat reluctant to embark on learning anything more than the rudiments of Sibelius. My understanding from colleagues who have used Allegro (the slimmed down version of Finale) is that it produces excellent output, has a very satisfactory learning curve (and it's wayyyyy less expensive than either Finale or Sibelius), has really all the features that most people would require, and is upwardly compatible with Finale (should you ever need "professional" refinements).

I started out using Noteworthy Composer nearly a decade ago and found it very easy, and I liked it's not being tied to fixed measure sizes (you can simply put a bar in anywhere, in any part) plus its ability to (micro)manage MIDI details (such as diminuendo/crescendo and acceleranco/ritardando). I was mostly put off by the lack of quality in the visible output. But if I had something that needed to be done "quick and dirty" ... it was just right. When one of my sons was college-bound to major in music, I invested in Finale (which was the program students at his university were expected to use) and never looked back.

I had previously written (and used) my own TeX-based engraving routines in a system I was developing (which I called TaLLiS), but when I found Finale, I abandoned that project.

I've made some limited use of LilyPond, mostly out of necessity in my role as an administrator at CPDL and manager of its ChoralWiki (the wiki has a LilyPond extension for including snippets of music scores). It's chief drawback is that (like ABC, Gregorio, and own TaLLiS, Gregorio, and ABC) it does not come with a WYSIWYG interface).

Sibelius and Finale are not cheap, although there are academic/religious pricing options if you qualify. The others I've mentioned are quite inexpensive or even freeware/shareware. Personally, if I were on a budget, starting out, and couldn't stomach the "code and compile, then check the result, recode and recompile..." process of most of the lower echelon products, then I'd probably opt for Allegro.

I think you can try out/sample "demo" versions of some of these programs - which you should do.

I have used musescore which is free online and so far it has been surprisingly good for a free download. You can use 4 lines and erase the stems and barlines for chant.

A trifecta of Charles's for FINALE. The curve is steeper, but that has been a starter for me to increase accessiblity for more nuanced scores (not necessarily found in my pdf's herein.) Learning not to be daunted by the help index content, and focus upon finding the help page in FINALE lingo is a big leap, but worth it. And once you're not intimidated, you can see the simplicity of connections among the task bars and commands. I'm too old to go SIBELIUS, I have to learn how to ride a new Harley Sportster!

I've never been a Sibelius user; started at Finale 2.6. I don't find it hard to use at all. One issue is that, since there are so many possibilities, there are better and worse ways to do a specific task. Prime example: musica ficta...if done wrong they don't transpose properly.

The big problem with Finale is that it thinks in measures, so that any kind of unmetered music is essentially the result of a kludge.

However, my first notation program was (semi)Professional Composer, run on a Mac Plus...which besides being ugly would occasionally puke up a key signature of 13 flats and a note 3 octaves below the bass staff.

I use Sibelius. I like it. (I got it for a nice student discount while still a student.) I've never used Finale so I can't compare. sorry! :-)

My jazz guitarist housemate bought the subscription to NoteFlight, and is very happy with it, except he plays things where his band expects a Cb and the score keeps turNing that to B, which is annoying. He said it was just the free version with some "more bells and whistles" when he accidentally highlighted a button he didn't know about called "sync audi/video," which made him go Whoa, but he kind of has a Keanu Reeves vibe anyway. What he especially liked is that, as it was online, there is a way to group edit charts.
i suppose it was be even better when you can group edit chaNts.

FWIW.

amts: Finale will misguess accidentals too, but they're easy enough to fix. If you can't fix them in NoteFlight, then it's a useless tool, as it's giving you wrong notes.

Seconded on what Kevin said. One of the best features of Sibelius 6 is its ability to avoid collisions, which doesn't seem like a big deal until you see it happen. The scores look so much better than even Sibelius 5.

Quick question: does anyone have any experience with the XML export feature for swapping between Finale and Sibelius? How accurate is the file transfer? About to embark on a rather complex project involving several people and I'm wondering if we all need to be on the same software.

I had to import XML files into Finale and found that the translation was quite accurate.
As for collision problems in Finale, the only issue I get involves the text of low-lying alto parts, and it's easy enough to move the baseline down out of the way of the notes.

I see I missed some discussion on this. My guitarist housemate continues to be very happy with Noteflight. I have not asked him about the glitch I mentioned--taking something he wanted to right as Cb and converting it to a B (with a natural accidental---IFFFFF I understood what he was complaining about)--correct note, just written in a way that is out of sync with the key signature. The chance of that coming up in Sacred Music strike me as zero, and, as long as you keep your library below 25 pieces, it's free. The layout is designed exactly for playing and very useful for groups--very clean and easy to read.

"The chance of that (Cb) coming up in Sacred Music strike me as zero"
You don't know my sacred music, do you? ;-)

Sigh...

you put guitar chord names over your choral pieces? THAT would be confusing.

I do NOT mean the notes--I mean the actual name of the chord over the staff the way it is in pop music. Somehow this just keeps digging deeper. I didn't say Cb, I said the printed name of the chord CbMaj7===As Bmaj7, it prints in the conventional space-saving form. In Cb, it either converts to B or you have to write it out long, and that could mess up your spacing.

So far as I know, it prints whatever actual NOTE you ask it to.

Many, many long moons ago, this conversation started with what would be good for a non-specialist to use, and I can testify that Noteflight makes good clean, readable scores, with all the NOTES accurately notated...if you are adding guitar CHORD NAMES, then you have a pretty special praise band if your guitarist knows what Cb is.

I wonder what the guitar tab version of Spem in Alium looks like...

Speaking of which, in another discussion I mentioned that, on hearing the Kyrie from Palestrina's M. Brevis, he blurted out, 'I wonder if I could transcribe that for guitar?" He routinely does baroque scores, so it wasn't out of his range to think about it. Someone said that it was probably not possible, and it wouldn't be true polyphony--I assume referring to the inability to sustain notes at the same volume.

I played Tallis' Canon actually sung as a canon for him, and he fell in love instantly. He spent a half hour at least putting it in Noteflight to transcribe it--he was fiddling with assigning voices. Theoretically, here the guitar should work because there are no sustained notes.

It didn't. He confesssed failure somehwere when there were four voices.

But after he finished, he went, "Huh. You know how you aren't supposed to have parallel motion? There isn't very much of that." Remarkable, of course, because it is a round, but I said something like, 'Well, it was written by Thomas Tallis."

So now that we have beaten poor Noteflight to death--it is a good middling product, exactly aimed at people who want a serviceable product for $50 rather than something to conquer the world (Sibelius, Finale) at $600...And it got more publicity than it has probably gotten in years. I think it is French, so it will probably go on strike anyway...