Finale has been the world’s best selling music composing software for years. Each year, MakeMusic adds a ton of new features and improvements to their flagship product. There are numerous music programs out there that can manipulate loops and stretch audio, etc, but where do you turn when you have an inspired idea in your head and want to notate it on virtual staff paper?

Finale is the preferred music notation software package by professional musicians, composers, students, engravers, and music educators. Finale allows you effortlessly and transparently notate your music and give you complete creative control.

VST

My favorite feature of Finale 2008 is the new VST audio support. More specifically the addition of the Garritan Personal Orchestra®. This wonderful plugin gives you control over 250 world-class sounds including: saxophones, choirs, drum set, guitar, marching percussion, world instruments, clarinets, bassoons, violins and many more.

Most people think of Finale as being mainly a music notation software package, but it is also jam packed with features that rival the leading Digital Audio Workstations. Finale is known for enabling composers to create great-looking/sounding music notation quickly and easily. But, Finale can do much more than make your music visually appealing. This powerful software comes with hundreds of features such as: Record/Import Audio, save your songs as MP3s, WAVs or AIFFs, and integrate powerful tools such as KONTAKT Player 2.

Plug-ins Galore

Plug-ins let you add capabilities to Finale that enable you to perform specialized tasks. Here are just a few:

• Chord Analysis looks at your notes and generates chord names from the harmony, analyzing any number of staves across any region and placing chord symbols automatically according to your specifications.
• Drum Groove - Add drum parts to your score — add more by simply placing any MIDI file in the drum groove folder — the plug-in intelligently cuts and pastes ONLY the drum and percussion information.
• Staff Set-up places selected instruments automatically adding appropriate clef, transposition and instrument name.
• Auto Slur Melismas analyzes your lyrics, and automatically places slurs anytime a syllable lasts for more than one note. You can even specify dashed slurs in situations with multiple verses.

Finale 2008 is still one of the best music notation programs out there to help you turn your ideas into music.

A demo of Finale 2008 is available for download for both Mac and Windows platforms.