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Category: Software

Software

  • Sibelius

    Sibelius

    This a renowned music notation software that has been widely used by composers, musicians, and educators. It’s now a subscription service so you may wish to think about that before buying because this could turn out to be quite expensive. There are several variants. Sibelius First (free to get) gives you just 4 staves to work with. Sibelius Artist (£89 p.a.) gives you 16 and Sibelius Ultimate (£169 p.a.) gives you unlimited staves. In addition you can only work with 16 instruments on the 1st two offerings. Monthly subscriptions are available. You pay more for them.

    Installation was a bit odd. Several times in quick succession what I think would be the terminal command box flickered on and off. This usually happens with much older installation routines (say more than 20 years old) and occurs when device drivers are being installed. Its not harmful to your PC but can be disconcerting. The age of the installation routine can also be seen in that it offers you the option to view the Windows Install Log. MacOS versions are available.

    Sibelius appears to be designed to work with Pro Tools. You can cut and past MIDI between the two. Avid owns both Sibelius and Pro-Tools so this shouldn’t be a surprise. If you want to use other DAWs you’re going to have to import and export MusicXML files. For now. Some software houses are working on ways of duplicating the cut and paste functionality.

    Creating a new score enables you to choose from a number of templates which includes Piano Quintets and Marching Bands. Or Just start from a blank page. Choosing Piano Solo brought up a number of options which included a ‘House Style’ with selections such as Handwritten or Jazz Reprise. You can also change instruments here and select Harpsichord or Great Organ. There are other options but they’re pretty intuitive such as time signature, tempo etc.

    sibelius 1

    Just fill in the blanks ?

    Which you do by going to the Score Info. Don’t worry, click on something like the word Composer and you’ll get an option to take you there.

    There’s a floating ‘Keypad’ where you can select items for copying to your score, or you can create a scale just by typing the letters CDEFG etc. Sibelius will put them on the stave for you. In addition hover your mouse over where you would want to put a not and a grey version will appear. Click to insert it.

    Of course this isn’t the only way of composing. Sibelius can take a MIDI file and convert it to a score. You can also export the score you’ve created to a variety of formats. You don’t have to wait to hear just how amazing your composition is. There are many MIDI instruments available so you can listen immediately from the Play menu option. If you just happen to have a MIDI keyboard (or MIDI Guitar) you can use that to help compose your masterpiece as well.

    Caveat Emptor! If you don’t know much about musical notation then this product probably is not for you. It’s definitely aimed at trained musicians and even then some may struggle with this product. But like anything else experience counts and you’ll find it easier as you go on.

    On the plus side this will help you polish to your score prior to publication and since you can export to a PDF

    If composing, editing or arranging is what you do for a living then this will do well for you. If you’re a music student there are education editions on offer.

  • AnthemScore

    AnthemScore

    AnthemScore is specialized software designed for automatic music transcription. It’s developed by Lunaverus and has been recognized for its ability to convert audio files into sheet music or guitar tabs with impressive accuracy. It does make some mistakes though, which is why you will probably also need to get hold of score editing software. Depending on which version you buy, 2 of the 3 have a built in editor.

    It’s not a subscription model of purchase, you simply buy it. AnthemScore Lite costs £25.59 and the Professional version retails at £34.32. Both of these come with one year of updates. Then there’s the Studio version which costs £87.36 and comes with a lifetime of free updates. That can be very cost effective. The Lite version has no editor.

    So what does it actually do? You can feed a WAV or MP3 file into it which will turned into, for example, a piano reduction of the track you’ve loaded. First it will do the AI analysis and you’ll get a screen that looks like the featured image. Very quickly though, it will be followed by this:-

    anthemscore 2

    There’s a MIDI play back available. and you can have it transcribed into a range of instruments such as Guitar, Violin, Cello, Harp, Bassoon, Sax or Concert Ukulele. Yes, really!

    In the Edit > Sheet Music settings you can set the guitar output to be in tabs and even select what type of instrument does the MIDI playback.

    This particular version, by the Wiener Philharmoniker, has a choral part added, hence that odd high note which you might want to edit out. You can either use the built in editor (beyond the scope of this review) or export the project as a MusicXML file. Actually you can export it in a number of formats, such as PDF or MIDI or a CSV containing Beat and Note data or the Spectrogram Amplitudes.

    It does have some weaknesses. In trying to transcribe a pieces of music that had a mandolin playing, the output score doubled up many of the notes. You can understand why that might happen (it would probably do the same for a bazouki or twelve string guitar) so if you want to transcribe music from those twin stringed instruments you’ll definitely need to either buy a copy with a built in editor or get hold of some music editing software like Sibelius or MuseScore.

    Some have criticised the license management module but we found no real issues with it. There are, after all, quite a few bits of software that open up new functionality after entering a license key, especially in WordPress website plug-ins.

    Why would you buy this? Well if you have a pressing need to create piano reductions of orchestral music, perhaps because you’ve got a dance school and you want the music for the pianist, you’d certainly want this pieces of software. Other options are for instrumentalists wanting to get hold of some sheet music, or guitar tabs, for a piece that might be hard to get hold of, well, look into this software. if you do a lot of that then even the most expensive purchase option will be cost effective. This is a very powerful tool indeed.

The Music Realm
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