MagicScore Maestro 4 is certainly a top-end tool, and appears to be able to do virtually anything the user may ask of it - far beyond anything I could possible require. The Maestro 4 version is the all-singing-all-dancing version, but there are also Classic and Schools versions which are both simpler and cheaper.
So that's part of the reason I'm reviewing it here - the other part is that I now realise that many more of you than I had suspected, might find it useful. This caused me to do a bit of web-hunting for a suitable alternative - where I discovered MagicScore Maestro 4 ( at just $49.50, and was lucky enough to get a review copy of the program. I had been using the reasonably priced and very easy-to-use Noteworthy program ( for a year or two when I found (whilst doing the bits of notation for the booklet of MT's Stephen Baldwin CD) that it wasn't possible to add bowing marks to the notation. However, if it's not something you do every day, some music notation software is pretty pricey - and the cheaper end of the market tends to omit the more obscure stuff, which is often needed to catch the subtleties of traditional music.
Quite true but, with the aid of a piece of music notation software, it didn't take me too long to learn how to write it. "But you don't read music!" I hear you cry. At the Folkworks workshop weekend in Darlington last year, every single one of the two dozen or so players could read - so it was just as well that I'd heeded complaints in earlier years and supplemented 'ear learning' with some staff notation examples. Whatever my students have got out of it, something that I've learned from various bits of melodeon tutoring work I've done, is that far more people can read music these days. MagicScore Maestro 4 and SharpEye MagicScore Maestro 4 music notation software DG Software SharpEye music OCR program Visiv Software