Seeking a good sheet music program.

[IndyPendant]

Hi all.

I'm hoping to pick the brains of this intelligent community.

My wife is an amateur, casual composer for her choral group, and she has been struggling with Printmusic! as her sheet music creation program for years. It is a *horrible* program, with a buggy, counterintuitive interface and utter crap for customer support. But it does choral sheet music reasonably well (when it's not mimicing a stubborn two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum, anyways...: ) and it is relatively simple to use, i.e. not having 10,000 options, 9,900 of which she would never use.

Does anyone out there know of another program that might be more user-friendly? Specifically, it needs to be designed to help create and print sheet music, and be somewhat user-friendly. (To give you an idea, I consider Microsoft Word to be sufficiently user-friendly to apply, if it could design sheet music.)

If so, please let me know what it is, okay?

Thanks.

 

[Eridanis]

Bump. I'd like some recommendations, myself; my church choir director has lots of photocopies of frequently-used introits, responses, and such (good idea), but most of them are handwritten (not so good). I'd love to get them typed up and cleaned up so they're easier to read.

 

[Ferret]

I've heard from my brother that guitar pro is good. Not sure how easy to use it is though.

 

[Jdvn1]

I have an old version of Studio, by Midisoft.

Version 3.11, I believe is the number, back when Windows 3.11 was the OS of choice, and Studio was freeware.

I use it for my composing needs. It does everything I need it to do, though the print-out result is often poorly formatted. I use it to put down notes and rhythms, and I rarely use it for sheet music. I do that mostly by hand, because I'm better at notating music better than any program I've seen, and it's really easy to do it by hand.

It's really hard to find nowadays, but I suppose I could upload a copy someplace.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I have an old version of Studio, by Midisoft.

Version 3.11, I believe is the number, back when Windows 3.11 was the OS of choice, and Studio was freeware.

A great program. I have it myself and highly recommend it.

 

[Gulla]

One of my frieds is very happy using Lilypond for her choir. An example of that can be seen here. Tha FAQ for lilypond is here

Personally I use ABC-notation for my Sheet music using ABC-edit, a very simple program, but it prints nicely. It requires learning ABC-notation, but that took me less than an hour.

Both of these are free (ABC-edit requires you to sent the programmer an email, he haven't spammed med at all, not even with news of updates, so it should be risk-free) so she can try them out.