Sibelius

A very good program for composing and transposing music. I recently wrote both my GCSE compositions on Sibelius and found it was easy to use, most of the time. You can write in full score, for a diverse rance of instruments, from the recorder to the digeredoo, and add lots of notation, and musical devices like glissandos. This suprised me, as some other programs like this don't alow for things like dynamics. It does take a while to get your head round the controls, but once you get the hang of it then its easy to create and modify your music. Another usefull thing it does is back up your scores every time you shut the program down. This means you never lose any work, ...

(For those of you who don't know, Sibelius is a score writing program. This is basically like a word processor, but for music ; with it you can create music that looks exactly the same as what you would find in any sheet music you buy from a publisher - in fact many publishers actually use Sibelius (eg. Faber, Hal Leonard) It's only really a tool for professional musicians, or diehard home music enthusiasts - and it's aimed more at the classical school of composition as opposed to popular music. Check out the website www.sibelius.com and download the scorch plugin to get some ideas as to what it does.) There has already been much praise ...

Sibelius is just so far in advance of other scorewriters. If Chandler were describing it he would say something like, "Sibelius is just a dot in the distance to Noteworthy Composer." Sibelius can do everything (ok it won't make your tea while you use it). Quintuplets, septuplets, old music, cross-bar beaming, etc. etc. Basically we are talking publishable quality music. And writing on a change of dynamics will change the dynamics in MIDI playback, which doesn't happen in a sequencer. You might think this type of functionality will make the interface complicated and unwieldy, but in fact Sibelius has one of the most intuitive interfaces of ...