A guide to music notation software. May your music look, and sound, great.

In mid-2019 I collected 315 responses from users of all of the major music notation software products. The responses were really telling. Since the last survey, some things have changed. This is truly a great time to be a musician, as all products performed well despite there being some really interesting trends and shakeups.

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A guide to music notation software

What is the point of music notation software? The primary point is to notate your music electronically, for printing. Secondary points include creating mock-ups and virtual realizations of how your music sounds, scoring to picture, transcribing in real-time, and so many other wonderful things these products can do for us, the musical community.

So, let’s dig in!

This survey can be broken into a few parts. The only parts I am not covering in this particular article are all of the hundreds of individual paragraphs of long-form text reviews, as I want to devote another article entirely to them.

The results of the survey can be broken into 6 sections. The PDFs linked below can be downloaded and used for your personal and educational purposes. But, please do not distribute them for commercial use. In all, I would prefer you refer interested readers to this page on Composer’s Toolbox, where there are other articles to help understand and contextualize these results.

A guide to music notation software broken into 6 parts

1 – Responses by Software

There were 315 respondents. The table and pie chart show the number of respondents who use a certain music notation software company. This is pretty self-explanatory. Please remember that this is only who responded, and the ratios in the pie chart do not represent the ratio of how many users use each program.

2 – Types of respondents

Each of the 315 respondents was required to say what their role as a musician is. They could select multiple roles/professions, which is why there are more than 315 roles/professions listed.

3 – Quantitative Scores

Each respondent ranked their experience with the software they primarily use. It was on a 5-point scale, but the user could select “N/A” when an experience did not apply to them or their software. For example, Lilypond users cannot answer questions about playback, because Lilypond does not have a playback feature! I colored certain bars in the graphs black to show that the data isn’t applicable in certain cases.

4 – Reasons users moved to their current software

Many users moved to their current software from another program. They were asked for the top 3 reasons they moved. Some users provided 1, some 2, and some 3 reasons why they moved to their current software. Each reason is a pre-populated category I came up with. A few times, respondents came up with their own categories/reasons, which I marked as “Other”.

5 – Reasons users want to leave their current software

This is the same setup as number 4, except it only applied to users wanting to leave their current software. Some users provided just 1, just 2, or a full 3 reasons. Other responses that didn’t fit the categories were changed to “Other” in the few instances they occurred.

6 – Moving software

This is the most telling, but dense, result. It shows:

• In blue, the software people are currently using.
• Shaded red, the percentage of people who want to leave that software, and the percentage of those people who want to go to a particular software.
• In green, the percentage of people who moved to their software from another one, and the percentage of those people who moved from a particular software.

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The summary of this guide to music notation software

Here are the big takeaways from this, in broad summaries. Please review the PDF results in detail; there is so much nuance to everything, and detailing every exact item would not be suited for a blog post–more like a book.

Sibelius is a good program, perched for an attrition problem.

https://www.avid.com/sibelius

Sibelius more or less ranks on par with Finale on most quantitative scores. But, items number 5 and 6 indicate that the management change has alienated some users.

Finale’s attrition problem not as bad as it seemed to be last year.

https://www.finalemusic.com/

Last year’s survey painted a grim picture for Finale. However, this year it wasn’t so bad. It scored quantitatively with the rest of the top performers, and not as many people seem to want to abandon it quite yet.

Dorico has made big strides.

https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/

From a handful of responses last year to a sizable representation, not only has Dorico scored well, but its popularity seems to be catching the eye of current users of other software. I was particularly interested in how it beat out the die-hard Lilypond population in the note input score.

Lilypond has a good reputation.

http://lilypond.org/

There’s no doubt about it. Lilypond is known for some damn good engraving, from inputting the music to making it look great to exporting PDFs.

MuseScore is a rising power.

https://musescore.org/en

Scoring almost consistently in the middle of the pack, MuseScore has apparently poached some paid-software users, and not many people are unhappy with their experience.

Notion deserves a seat at the table.

https://www.presonus.com/products/notion

Some users from other software decided to try something new, and only a small number of current Notion users think their program isn’t meeting their standards.

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Concluding the guide to music notation software…

Everyone, though, is generally happy with their experience. This is any software’s market to claim.

All programs scored high in the rankings. Many people want to leave their software, but with the shakeups in the market this is any software’s game. If certain things are tweaked, for example if Dorico makes a mistake, or Sibelius’s management creates a better image, or Finale improves things at a quicker rate, or if MuseScore gets taken more seriously, or if Lilypond’s reputation exceeds the perceived learning curve, or if Notion gains more traction–or if a new competitor enters the ring–things could end up much differently.

The point is, choose the software after doing your research. Read over this guide to music notation software and the PDFs above, but more importantly, ask people you know! A professional musician friend is your best resource! You now know that the research at a large scale has been done, so now is the time for you to decide for yourself. I look forward to discovering more, and I hope the study helps you!

Happy music-making,

Dan

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Disclaimer

The above article is a guide to music notation software. It refers to responses I collected to a survey in mid-2019 about music notation software, which gathered 315 responses from users of the major products. Please note that I am not a representative of any software company, even though I actively use music notation software as a professional musician.