MusicEase

Comments from Users

Below is a list of comments from users of MusicEase over the years.

On a separate note, I know people who use Finale. To my eye, the scores they produce are quite poor— the default staff lines are thin, only 3 dots of a 600 dpi score; the default vertical bars are the same thickness as the staff lines, the staff spacing is quite rigid, and seems to have no inter-staff collision avoidance. Greenway Music Press require their editors to submit scores in Finale, and the Greenway publications are sub-standard IMO.

MusicEase Pro, on the other hand, produces by default scores that are uncannily similar to my late 19th c./early 20th c. engraved scores from Leduc, Barenreiter, etc. I don’t understand why MusicEase Pro is very rarely mentioned in blogs or surveys of music engraving software.

Dave

I love your ME Pro. Have been relying on it for almost 20 years. Seeing some of my fellow composers struggle with Finale makes me even more grateful.

D.W.

As the Holiday season approaches, I find myself entering even more music into what has become my primary music notation software package - MusicEase. Even though it's a busy time of the year for our choir, the simplicity of MusicEase makes changes and new arrangements very easy. For most songs, I can enter notes, chords and lyrics in around 15 minutes.

I realized that I now have over 4,000 songs in my MusicEase folder. They range from basic one page tunes to scores containing up to four staves and numerous pages. Your program takes everything I dish out.

Before I found MusicEase, I worked with Encore, Finale and Sibelius. Encore was the most flexible, Finale the most difficult to learn (and frustrating because nothing seems logical) and Sibelius, though better than Finale, still tough to work with. MusicEase has logical keyboard keys to do things (I hate using a mouse). It's just a great program to work with.

And those few times I've had a question, you responded via email very promptly and with the right information. That says a lot in these days of sloppy customer service.

So, I just wanted to say Thank You for MusicEase. I look forward to using it for many more years.

Dennis Scott

I love your software. I purchased Musicease Professionial years ago and out of all of the music notation software I've tried, I can enter an entire piece in record time using MusicEase. Thank you!

J.C.

I've been using MusicEase for more than 18 years and it has been able to do just about everything that I needed in standard music notation. It's easy to use, flexible, and has excellent technical support.

Karl Kroeger
Composer and Music Editor
Professor Emeritus of Music
University of Colorado

And thanks for producing such a fine piece of software that, as low-tech the note entry may be compared to Finale or Sibelius, gives an absolutely gorgeous shape-note output that neither program can match.

cn

Hi, I've been using Musicease for about a year now, and I must tell you how much I love it! I've been creating an instrumental version of our church hymnal and it is going very well. I've also started writing music and have been able to input my pieces and accompaniments very easily... Thanks again for a superior product! It is a real pleasure to find well-written software!

jb

"I have to say that your support over the months since I purchased your program has been wonderful. I'm very pleased with your program and the music that it produces. I teach a choral arranging course at [a well-known US university] and I can tell you that the assignments my students do on Finale do not look nearly as good as what your program produces. And, the students all complain about the difficultly in using Finale. I have had nearly 150 compositions and arrangements published over the years and have dealt with many publishers. Recently, for the first time, I had a publisher comment on the quality of a music printout I had submitted! I really think you should do some more promotion. You've got a fine product! Thanks again."

Professor of Music

"I really do like working with MusicEase, and use it for all my work now, even quite complicated scores - although my students - (I am a lecturer in Music Theory and Composition) - tend to go for the whizz-bang programs like Finale and Sibelius."

V. O.

"A great little editor, not too complicated, but with all the power most people will ever need."

Greg R.

"This [MusicEase] has become my choice for composition software. It doesn't have all the bells & whistles of Finale, but it does the job I need to do with a reasonable learning curve."

Ted D.

"You have every right to be proud, it seems to me. It's possible to sit at the keyboard and actually type music, once you learn a few commands. And it's certainly not hard to learn. The folks at [fill in the name of a company well known for its notation software] could learn a lot from you!"

Greg Sandow, Reviewer for Musician Magazine

"I've tried several different notation programs, and I'm convinced that MusicEase is the best one for our type of music. That's because of the versatility in changing between the voices, and the fact that it's just as easy to do SSA as SATB. The main thing is the way your software handles lyrics and is able to rejustify to allow for any length of syllables. If you've ever sung German, you probably know that it's not unusual to get a syllable with 7 or 8 letters in it. Try and make "geschwindischkeit" fit under 4 beamed 1/8 notes, and you'll see what I mean. But MusicEase handles these strange German syllables with no problem, and the music is easy to read and looks beautiful besides."

Kathy Hinsman, Teutonia Mannerchor und Damenchor

"I recently transcribed a full band score into twenty separate parts for Dr. Bill Moffit using MusicEase Professional. The music will be played by Purdue University band at the Indy 500 auto race in May. I also have the Finale software for electronically published arrangements, but my learning curve was too great to get this done on time, so I fell back to my trusted MusicEase Professional. So chalk this up for ease of use of your software. I also used Music Ease to transcribe several pieces, also arranged by Dr. Moffit for Jacksonville's annual Tuba Christmas. I've read that Finale can do most of these things but I'm not a keyboardist and I like the low tech entry and edit features that MusicEase offers."

Larry Tallman, Jacksonville, Florida.

"I can't say enough good about this program. In 15 minutes I was able to do in tablature what the other programs like Finale and Encore only promised but were unable to deliver. I have set up and printed 1/3 of the material from the bluegrass section of my banjo book. I thought I'd never be able to do it. This is like having your own publishing company.

This program is really a delight to work with. After 6 years of searching and purchasing music programs to write tablature that promised what I needed, but would not deliver, I now have a program that is:

1. easy to use
2. works
3. prints excellent copy."

Bill Palmer, A.I.M.C.

I think it's an excellent program for the kind of work I'm doing, and I'm very pleased with the support you've provided since I started using the program.

I play in a Boston-based R&B group called "Elaine Scursi and Soul Jones". I play guitar in the band, but I write charts for the horn section as well. We need to have highly readable charts because we don't always use the same horn players, and it's important that people be able to pick things up very quickly, sometimes even playing fairly complex pieces without having rehearsed them. The horn players we work with are very good, but it's important that the charts be highly legible as well. I've charted dozens of tunes for 2 and 3 horns using MusicEase.

I've found MusicEase to be ideal for this kind of work. I evaluated a number of notation programs before I went with MusicEase, by reading reviews of them or by down-loading demos and trying them out. I'm a pretty experienced computer user, but I didn't like the user interface in most of these programs. They either didn't present the music the way I wanted to see it, or it was too complicated to enter the music I needed to write. With MusicEase, what I see on the screen looks just like what I get out of the printer, and I find it very simple and straightforward to enter the music, making me highly productive. The bottom line is, there's a good match between the way I work and the way the program works."

Ram Sudama.

"I would also like to say that I have tried many different notation products (among those Finale and Mozart), but none of them can compete with MusicEase when it comes to entering music rapidly and accurately. Using a mouse will never beat the efficient keyboard shortcuts of MusicEase."

Daniel F., Norway

"I have to say that your support over the months since I purchased your program has been wonderful. I'm very pleased with your program and the music that it produces. I teach a choral arranging course at [a well-known US university] and I can tell you that the assignments my students do on Finale do not look nearly as good as what your program produces. And, the students all complain about the difficultly in using Finale. I have had nearly 150 compositions and arrangements published over the years and have dealt with many publishers. Recently, for the first time, I had a publisher comment on the quality of a music printout I had submitted! I really think you should do some more promotion. You've got a fine product! Thanks again."

Professor of Music