[comp.music] public domain music notation sw?

kelpie@nwnexus.WA.COM (Anthony C. Garland) (11/09/90)

Are there any public-domain programs which facilitate writing
(fairly simple) music notation and printing it to a laser printer?
I expect to eventually have to pay good money to do advanced stuff,
but I'm just looking for something simple to get started with.

Also, has anyone seen ANY music notation packages which support
tablature (ala guitar in non-standard tuning) to any extent?  Last,
but not least, are there notation programs which can read or produce
files in some sort of semi-standard format (so that a person could write
an application to convert tablature into a valid input file for automatic
display in standard music format)?

	- Tony Garland
	  kelpie@nwnexus.wa.com

sh0001@medtron.medtronic.com (Scott Hansohn) (11/14/90)

Finale (by Coda) provides fairly extensive support for generating Guitar 
tablature.  As with other things in Finale, you have an amazing 
degree of control over the output format, available only by mastering
an amazingly complex/frustrating user interface.  Once you get used to
it though. . .

Briefly, you can completely define the staves your music is to be displayed
on.  There are defaults for the Western 5-line staves, but you can 
define custom ones to support microtonal, etc.

mgresham@artsnet.UUCP (Mark Gresham) (11/18/90)

In article <1990Nov13.182950.661@medtron.medtronic.com> sh0001@medtron.medtronic.com (Scott Hansohn) writes:
>Finale (by Coda) provides fairly extensive support for generating Guitar 
>tablature.  [...]

Check out the new Version 3.0 of SCORE.  A vast set of
improvements over the 2.x versions.  Includes symbols for old lute
tablature, even.  Greatest improvements, though, seem to be in the
text-handling capabilities and further refinement of slurs, ties,
and tuplet brackets.  The whole feel of the program seems
smoother, BTW.  Now supporting up to 32 staves per page, and has a
revised standalone pagination program (PAGE) that is different from the
2.x PAGE and improves upon part extraction as well.

Cheers,

--Mark

========================================
Mark Gresham  ARTSNET  Norcross, GA, USA
E-mail:       ...gatech!artsnet!mgresham
or:          artsnet!mgresham@gatech.edu
========================================