I am interested in arranging songs that I would like to play, based on what I hear from the many songs I want to play.

Can someone, with the experience, advise me on what software they use, what benefit it has and if it is capable of auto-harmonising, producing lead sheets, importing mp3, saving to a .pdf file.

Ragtime Clown,

I use MagicScore Maestro, mostly because it offers a lot of features at a reasonable price (though to be honest, it seems like the price goes up every version). It will produce just about any kind of score you want and save to image and pdf formats. It is not perfect if your goal is to publish the music, it takes quite a bit of manipulation to get the music close to what you want for publishing, but since that is not one of my goals I am not as concerned about that as I am about other features.

Auto-arranging? I'm not sure what you mean by that. It sounds to me kind of like you are asking for something like Band-In-A-Box. I've heard people use it, but I'm not familiar with it.

Convert from mp3: This is a part of software that is very, very challenging. You will not find this in notation programs. I know that there are two or three out there, Amazing Midi is the one that I am familiar with. I've never had good luck with this program. Search on Amazing Midi and you'll probably find a few threads on this program and also other posters mentioning the ones they have used.

Something you have not mentioned is software to help with transcribing. There are two that I am familiar with: Amazing Slow Downer slows down music with out (or minimally) changing the pitch so you can hear what is going on. Transcribe! also you to slow down or stop music plus see the frequencies relative to a piano keyboard.

Rich

Hey Ragtime, if you want to try composing before spending a bunch of bucks, you may want to take a look at MuseScore. It is an open source program so the price is right -- free! I am not familiar with Finale/Sibelius so I don't know how this compares as far as robustness etc. But I think it is pretty good. Why not try it out and see if it does what you want to do. You have nothing to lose but a little bit of time.

You can download MuseScore from this site:

http://www.musescore.org/

For auto-arranging Band in a Box is the best.

Serge