Finale SongWriter 2010
- Music-making software for songwriters, band directors, students, and other musicians
- Play MIDI keyboard and see music appear instantly; import and export MIDI and MusicXML files
- Print sheet music; share songs with free, downloadable Finale Reader; save MP3 files for an iPod
- Hear songs with a professional software synthesizer and 128+ sounds–no hardware required
- Composing and arranging tools; multiple-undo option; quick-start videos for getting started
While Finale SongWriter makes it easy to create great sheet music at an affordable price, that’s just the beginning. Finale SongWriter allows you to enter notes from a mouse, computer keyboard, or midi keyboard. You can add chord symbols, fretboard diagrams, and multiple verses of lyrics. Finale SongWriter can automatically add two and three voice harmony to your melodies and instantly add a drum part. The music you create sounds great through your computer’s speakers thanks to Human Playback and 128 professional sounds. You can import and export MIDI files, create MP3 files, and save your work as a standard Finale file which can also be shared with users of Finale Notepad (a free download). If getting music on the printed page is part of your songwriting project, Finale SongWriter is the perfect collaborator.
List Price: $ 49.95
Price: $ 39.98
Related posts:
XLNT Music Notation Software for a Budget Price!,
They call it Finale Songwriter, and that’s who it seems to be aimed at; I bought it to do charts for a friend who is a singer/songwriter, and I found it to be quite up to the task.
I got tired of updating the full Finale program, which I purchased back around 1995; the last update I bought was Finale 2001; updating every year was expensive, some $100 for each year’s new update; and it was annoying, too, since each new version seemed like it had to be learned all over again; so I finally stopped getting updates and stayed with my 2001d version. Since I don’t do much music charting, it was pointless to keep shelling out money for new updates.
Now, here we are in 2010; I’m using a newer Mac with OS X, and the few times I have to do notation, I have to run Classic Mode in order to use my ancient 2001d version of Finale, and already, the updates are requiring a later version of the OS than I have… so I checked out the various versions of Finale, and found this one; Songwriter 2010 is (I think) the last of the Finale programs that will still work with 10.4… and it’s also the least expensive, so I thought I would check it out. There is a fully-functional 30-day trial version available to download, so I tried it out by charting a few of my friend’s songs with it.
Even with Songwriter, there is a bit of a learning curve, since music notation is a bit of an involved, detailed process. But I found that all of the important functions are easily accessible, and once you get the hang of what menu they’re under, it seems to flow pretty well. All the important functions are present; what seems to be missing is all the customizing capability of the full Finale, such as all the little variations of the Repeat signs. It has Simple Note Entry, which is just grabbing a note with the mouse and placing it on the staff; this can be streamlined quite a bit if you have a MIDI keyboard: you use the numeric keypad to select a note value, and play a note on the MIDI keyboard to place it on the staff. I was thrilled to discover that Songwriter also has the Hyperscribe feature, which starts up a metronome, and lets you play a part into the program in real time. All the important text functions and spacing and layout controls are available too, so you can get a chart looking just right. It is limited to 8 staves, but for ordinary song charting, I can’t imagine needing more than 3 or 4.
In my opinion, Songwriter is more than adequate to most basic charting needs, and Finale has an upgrade policy if you should ever need more capability. Best of all, you can try the program for 30 days to determine if it will suit your needs.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Great Software – get your midi ports right.,
For those people having trouble getting this to work – make sure that midi out from the computer goes to midi in on the piano keyboard. And vice versa.
I knocked off a star because there is no PDF manual – it would be great to print off a few pages to keep to one side while learning the program. Especially regarding keyboard short-cuts. I ended up cutting and pasting into a Word document from the help screens.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Very Pleased!,
I bought my first computer, a Macintosh, in 1986-ish. I believe it came with (?) a music composition program that I had a blast with. I’ve pined for it ever since. When I discovered Finale Songwriter, I was in heaven. It’s user friendly and sings (plays) your compositions back to you instantly. BUY it. It will satisfy the creative soul in you.
Was this review helpful to you?
|