Review: Notion 4 shatters your musical notation notions

When I first heard that Notion Music had dropped the price of its musical notation editor and scoring package from $249 to $99, I thought that the company was getting ready to close shop and having a fire sale. Or they'd gone crazy. Apparently, however, the company's experience with the iPad version of Notion has convinced them that selling more programs at a lower price might make them more money. Whatever the reason, it's nice to know that the slickest score editor on the planet is safe, sound, and improving.

Both the Notion interface and its onscreen notation are eye-candy.

The first thing you'll notice when you run Notion is how good-looking everything is. The interface, the pages, the notation, the musical symbol palettes, etc. are all rendered in a very inviting style. The program simply makes you want to compose.

It's also easy to use compared to most of the competition. I have a long-standing beef with the notation software industry's lack of true drag-and-drop editing. Notion doesn't support it either, but its editing methods are slightly more intuitive than those employed by Sibelius, Finale, or MuseScore, so editing is easier with Notion.

Notion 4 has three excellent virtual instrument grids: a guitar, a piano, and a drum pad which allows you to enter notes. Notion Music's more guitar-oriented Progression featured a guitar, but these are new to Notion. The piano and guitar feature a preview mode so you can try things before you enter them, and both let you enter melodies or chords. If you're instrument-dependent, these are very useful features. The drum pad features a library of rhythm patterns you can drag to your score, but doesn't have a preview mode as the piano and guitar features.

Sound is another of Notion's strengths. The orchestral instruments were played by members of the London Symphony Orchestra and recorded at Abbey Road. There's about 6 gigs worth of them, and they sound very good. They even support most of the major articulations (staccato, legato, etc.). Notion also supports Rewire and VSTi so you can use third-party sample players, and there are inline presets for popular symphonic libraries such as Miroslav, Garritan, Vienna, and EWQL.

Drum, piano, and guitar grids make entering notes easy for nearly everyone.

One sound caveat: While the program includes most major instruments, missing are some staples such as classical guitar and jazz horns. You can easily compose with what's there, but there are enough missing that you might be tempted to grab some sounds from Notion's expansion packs. These run from $70 for a single-instrument pack, to $370 for all the available sounds.

Other nice facets of Notion are its broad support for guitar tablature (tab) and its unique sequencer staff. Notes appear on a staff, but are shaped like the notes you'd see in a step sequencer. There's also a sequencer overlay which adds a velocity and duration shadow to regular notes. Notion also has a performance mode, called NTempo mode where editing functions are disabled and performance features come to the fore.

I do have some minor nits to pick with Notion. I've already mentioned that there's no true drag-and-drop. Others include having only scroll bars and the mouse wheel available for scrolling the score (I'm not a wheel man), having to manually enter alternate string tunings, and no way to change the keyboard shortcuts à la MuseScore. Also, it would be nice to be able to enter notes from the grids while recording, which is apparently in the works.

About the only area where Notion isn't as versatile as the competition is in fine-tuning the placement of elements. Basically, it doesn't. It creates wonderful-looking scores, but if you want to move a single accidental three millimeters to the left, you're out of luck. You can, however, change the overall spacing used by the automatic notation engine, which produces very nice-looking output.

Notion also features a full-blown mixer with effects.

At one-third (or less) the price of full versions of Finale and Sibelius, Notion 4 is bargain and then some. It sets no artificial limits as do the entry-level Sibelius First, and Finale PrintMusic which are priced similarly. The only real competition at this price point is the free MuseScore, which is as capable with the basics, if not nearly as elegant or rich in note-entry tools.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Review: MuseScore is powerful and free musical notation software

If you thought you had to pay an arm and a leg for a top-notch musical notation editor, think again. MuseScore is powerful, versatile, and free. It may not offer the bells and whistles provided by some of the paid competition, but the core functionality is there: WYSIWYG creation and editing, support for unlimited staves, unlimited score length, a plug-in architecture, and excellent-looking notation.

You can compose intricate music with MuseScore.

The more I played with MuseScore, the more impressed I became. There's finer control over the size and spacing for nearly every object: clef, stave, accidental, performance mark, etc. than most users will need. It has MIDI input, Music XML import and export, its own internal sounds, and support for ASI0 (a low latency audio standard) and JACK MIDI (a free patch bay that works between MIDI programs), though not the more popular Rewire (another patch bay/signal router).

If you're used to Sibelius or Finale, you'll probably feel right at home with MuseScore. I'd prefer a simple left-click to do something other than just drag the page around, but that's me. One area where the program hits the nail on the head is allowing you to drag note modifiers and performance markings directly to the notes they will operate on. Brilliant.

Also brilliant is allowing users to redefine the keyboard shortcuts, though the process could be streamlined a bit. MuseScore is as challenged in the area of mouse editing as the rest of the notation industry, which has never seemed to fully grasp the drag-and-drop concept. But all in all, it's as easy for entering symbols and editing as the competition is.

Most MuseScore features work flawlessly, but I did find a couple of oddities. The program imported a piano MIDI file onto a single treble stave, rather than the usual treble and bass staves. There's a split staff function, but it would be nice to automate the process. Also, playback volume for the internal synthesizer was very low. Other than that, the program seemed stable as a rock.

MuseScore's page settings help you print out sheet music exactly the way you need it.

MuseScore is built on the cross-platform QT library and is also available for both Linux and the Mac. I highly recommend taking it for a test spin if you're in the market for your first notation program, or to see just how powerful free can be. Don't forget to check out the plug-in library which may offer any functionality that you find missing.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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