Does anyone know anything about this notation thing (link below)?
http://www.notationmachine.com/

From a quick look at the site, it appears that this will only generate sheet music from MIDI files. Other acoustical recordings must be preprocessed thru another piece of software to produce a MIDI file--they claim that this can be done but additional score editing "may be required."

Seems reasonable that it can produce sheet music from MIDI files, if that's what you're primarily interested in. But if you're looking to produce sheet music from audio files (.wav, .mp3, etc.) I'm a little skeptical that this is the answer, simply because the task of easily producing an accurate MIDI file from a regular acoustic recording strikes me as being a shaky proposition--for what that's worth.

[ August 02, 2001: Message edited by: wghornsby ]

Hi Patti, Notation software is not as simple as it sounds.

First of all, notation from audio files is not at all reliable and I wouldn't waste your money. You'll spend hours tweaking and re-tweaking to get anything out of it.

Normal "MidiFIle" based notation software is a bit easier & much more reliable. The one thing you should know is, just because you've got a MidiFile doesn't mean you'll be able to automatically print a score that is readable. You must have a MidiFile that is played to a strict metronome and quantized (timing corrected) before you can begin to have a score that actually looks like piano music. Remember, the computer doesn't know where the bar lines are unless you play to a click track.

After you've done that, you must still edit several parameters before it will look right...you have to designate a "split" point between the Clefs and that becomes the point where the left & right hand are "theoretically" split. The problem is, the Right & Left hand sometimes overlap and this software knows nothing about that...

I don't want to discourage you, but you need to know there is a bit of work involved in creating a nice looking score. Cakewalk software is quite popular, affordable & user-friendly.

Mat D.

[ August 03, 2001: Message edited by: Mat D. ]