Music Software

Audacity - Free open source program for audio recording

Music Notation Programs:

Finale - MakeMusic produces Finale, NotePad (free), PrintMusic, Allegro, Songwriter

Sibelius - includes Sibelius 4, Sibelius Sounds (CD creation), PhotoScore Professional 4 (scan music), Scorch (view, play, print Sibelius score on the Internet)

Music Notation Software - a site devoted to the many music notation software packages - an amazing collection by Gordon Callon.


Music Software Directories (shareware, freeware - many, many categories of music software from audio editors to vocoders).

Hitsquad Musician Network - Shareware Music Machine

MacMusic.org

Transcription

Transcribe! For Mac or PC. Will help you transcribe music from an audio source. I t can also be used for play-along practice. "It can change pitch and speed instantly, and you can store and recall any number of named loops.

The Amazing Slow Downer - for Mac OS X. Slow down or speed up music (e.g. from a CD) without changing the pitch. Loop segments, adjust the EQ and pitch. Great for transcription. Very slick!

Accompaniment Programs:

iLife-05-GarageBand-lg
GarageBand - Part of Apple's iLife software package (Mac only), GB makes it extremely easy to construct backup tracks of infinite variety. Not especially useful for constructing accompaniment tracks for chord progressions; for that, see below.




Band-in-a-Box-2005-sm
Band-in-a-Box - the program has an interface only a mother could love, but it does a good job of providing a tireless piano, bass, and drums (among other possibilities) for improvisation practice over chord progressions.





Other:

box_pm
Ars Nova - a company that offers 3 programs (Mac or PC): Practica Musica (music theory and ear training tutor), Counterpointer (counterpoint tutor), and Songworks (music notation)





Music Math - is a freeware program for the Mac that converts note values (Beats Per Minute, Transpose, Delay, Samples, Timestretch, per cent, and more.