[ExI] Free Music editor program

[Emlyn]

2010/3/25 BillK <pharos at gmail.com>:
> This program might be of interest to the musicians on the list.
>
> You have 20 hours left to download the complete free version.
>
> <http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/magicscore-school-6/>
>
> MagicScore School is wonderful music notation and music writing software,
> offering the most advanced capabilities for music schools, students,
> teachers and music lovers.
>
> System Requirements: Windows 98/NT/2000/Me/XP/Vista/7
>
> User comment:
> Excellent, and very unique software. I had installed this giveaway several
> years ago, and have not found a better or more powerful sheet music composer
> than this one.
>
> Screenshot:
> <http://www.musicaleditor.com/screenshots/4/PayBackEditorwPiano1280.png>
>
>
> BillK

Sibelius is the gold standard in this area. This one looks ok, a bit
more simplistic, but still, a lot cheaper! I'm afraid I find it really
difficult to get excited about temporarily free beer software though.
It's the 90s type of free*.

Meanwhile there's a lot in the open source space, some are supposed to
be pretty good. My wife tells me that Lilypond is the one that all the
free** music sites use as standard. Checking it out, it's based on
TeX, and very much inside that philosophy; you write markup and it
emits impeccable scores. I like the look of that, but I showed it to
my wife and, paraphrasing, she said "wtf?". There are free** GUIs for
lilypond around, like GNU Denemo, but they all look a little
primitive. GUIs for these markup based tools are usually more trouble
than they're worth, imo.

* not free
** actually free

-- 
Emlyn

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