Finale Notepad

About five years ago I came across one of the best pieces of freeware ever in existance: Finale Notepad. Finale Notepad is from MakeMusic, Inc. who makes high class professional music-writing Finale brand software.

Finale Notepad 2008 allows you to make nice quality looking music by simply selecting the staff layout, the time signature, and key. Then you make your music by clicking on the staff where you want the notes, rests, lyrics, articulation, or whatever you want to include in your music. Here what the toolbar looks like:

You can also import midi files into the program to instantly create the sheet music. I haven't played with that feature much, but what dabbling I've done, took some editing to clean it up, but did a pretty good job.

You can also play back your composition and select different midi instruments with incredible sounding SmartMusic Midi codec (for lack of a better term) to play back different lines of music. This works great for people like me who can't play the piano in real time worth beans. Its also nice when you have multiple staffs to play all at the same time with different timing. Mix that with the different instruments and you can literally compose for an orchestra and hear what it will sound like..

Its amazing to think you could get better than Finale Notepad. If this powerful software is free, it makes me wonder what the $600 Finale software can do!

Free does have its price, though. You are limited to one key (no key changes mid-song). You are stuck with only the most common time signatures and a limited number of articulations. There are a few other limitation, but, quite frankly, I'm not knowledgable enough about writing music to know what's missing. Considering the price, those limitations are easy enough to work around.

Here's a sample of how nice the music looks: