• Windows XP
• Windows 2000
• Mac OS X

final print music

easy to start using and easier progressions to higher levels of use

Supposed to be great software, but it flopped for me

Finale--the maker of this software--has a free, downloadable notation software program you can download. Their other products, including this one, are all fancier versions. My son wanted a version that was too expensive for us, but had marching band percussion sounds. Then this year MakeMusic added percussion sounds to Finale PrintMusic 2006. I bought it immediately (at a university bookstore, actually), as it had many amazing features at a good price (one can input notes through a microphone, by scanning sheet music that the program will then read, by MIDI from a keyboard, etc.). But I can't get any of those features to work. When I scan in black and white, it says it thinks I scanned in color and it won't read it. My son played his trumpet into the microphone, and what showed up onscreen was largely unrelated to what he played. Most frustrating, I can't get my keyboard and the software to work together to input notes effectively. I borrowed a different keyboard--a Yamaha Clavinova--and it did actually input notes to the software, so I thought maybe my Yamaha PSR keyboard was the problem, although I read that the UNO interface I was using has problems with some Yamaha keyboards. But even though I was able to get notes to the software with the Clavinova instead of the PSR keyboard, the software didn't notate them especially well. Upon switching to a Yamaha MIDI interface, my PSR does enter a note every time I push a key (instead of once every several seconds), but again the software doesn't notate it accurately. It has also skipped measures when I input lyrics. I'm sure others have had great experiences with this software, but I wish I'd stayed with the free Notepad software and just kludged along.