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Hopefully one of you is familiar with this programme. I'm trying to make a digital copy of a three-voice fugue, and I've figured out where the voice settings are and everything, but I haven't figured out how I actually start notating in another voice. Any help would be great.

You mean Musescore?

According to the manual,
http://musescore.org/en/handbook/voices
you seem to have two voices available on each stave. To start entering in Voice 2, click on the Voice 2 button and enter notes exactly the same way as you did into Voice 1. Advanced notation programs (Sibelius, Finale) allow 4 voices per stave. Musescore appears to allow just 2, which may present problems in transcribing a 3-voice fugue.

Yes, sorry about that spelling error ... it was 3AM and I should've been asleep about three hours prior.

There are only ever two voices on a stave in the fugue, so it will do just fine. I had clicked the Voice 2 button, but I was unable to place the notes. Do I have to go from the very beginning of the piece like in Voice 1, or is there some sort of trick?

OK, I just downloaded it. Not bad for free!

Did you click the big letter N to get into Note Input mode?

I see you CAN have up to 4 voices.

I figured it out, though it took me a while. See my new topic with the finished product.

It is a really good piece of software for a freebie, I agree! I was pleased to find it, being cheap as I am.

No, Musescore has four voices per staff. On that upper row just to the right of the notes and accidentals, there are four numbered buttons arranged in a square and color coded:

1 = blue
2 = green
3 = orange
4 = violet

You have to go into note entry mode, then select your duration and voice.

Every voice you use has to be complete from the beginning of the measure, so if a voice comes in later than the first beat, you have to enter rests in that voice before you can get to its first note.

Unselected notes appear in black, but selected ones appear in their voice color. Select entire measures to see what's in which one.

This program sound very tedious.

Maybe. But it's free, and it's trying to compete on equal terms with software that is very, very expensive.

haha, they aren't copying Sibelius at all, then?

Oh boy... Finale's first layer is blue as well (2nd is red, 3rd is blue/green don't remember)... bloody heck. Who's copying who now?

I've used the free version of MuseScore before and If i remember correctly, on the free version, you can't listen to any other voicings you input except for voice 1. Also, I don't know if you're having this issue, but I always had to reset the playback mode when I used it so it took me about a half hour to just listen to the first voicing. For me, it's a complex program that I don't want to mess with.

I can listen to all of the voices at once without issue. I don't have the playback problem, either. *shrugs*

It is a wonderful program. For piano-only score composition, it gives you just about everything you need. You do have to do fingering by hand, but it is doable. Everything you need...

For chamber music, acceptable.

Stock sound is not the greatest, but the program is flexible enough to allow you to import better-quality sound banks (which you can find on your own ).

I've never used Sebelius (sp?) or Finale, but suspect they allow more effective management of larger scores, better control of playback (e.g. accel. and ritard), playback support for crescendos, etc. - which MuseScore at last check lacks. Others can confirm.

A process I've found effective for synthesized music is composition within MuseScore, export the individual staves as MIDI files, and then import into CuBASE for final mixing, modulation, and mastering. CuBASE of course gives you the minutest dynamic control - pretty much everything you could want for a high-quality rendered recording.

That is true. The program has its quirks. Also... save your work frequently... It tends to have difficulty with tuplets, esp. copying and pasting within a measure.

But hey, for a free and open source score input program... hard to beat.

Actually, you have have as many "voices" - if by that one means piano, violin, clarinet, oboe, etc. (as opposed to "voices" in a music theory sense ala a Bach fugue) as the page will hold. Not sure what the upper limit is, but I've had as many as 14 staves.

Urg... Sibelius's support for crescendos (and velocity dynamics in general) is buggy as heck. I usually have to fix these in a different program It's my one real complaint about Sibelius, other than the obvious one -- the price.

In my view, the main advantages of Sib over MuseScore are

1. VST support
2. Stability/reliability
3. Huge range of compositional tools

Most of the features I'm thinking of for (3) probably _could_ be implemented for MuseScore as plugins, or something; but they aren't.

I'm impressed at what MuseScore can do for free, but I find I'm too limited by what it can't do. YMMV, of course.