Oh! The title? Something a visiting lecturer said to us on the subject of Your First Solo Show when I was a student.

What It's Really About: software for notating music.

Being (a) penniless most of the time  , and (b) musically inclined (like leaning against the bar after a concert  ) I tend to look out for freeware rather than utilities that will soon be obsolete, and cost the equivalent of three weeks food. My first discovery (and I still use it sometimes) is Coda Technology's Finale Notepad. It can't do everything, but it can do a lot, and it has a big brother that can do everything and then some. The disadvantage of FNP is that you can't share files electronically with someone who doesn't use FNP. Which brings me to My Favourite: ABC notation has been around for roughly a decade already, and is continuing to develop. While I'm sure technology will soon advance to a point where the present limitations will become a thing of the past, in the meantime, ABC notation allows musicians to write music (including chords and voices) in a human-readable, text-only format. Even if the recipient doesn't have the same software that the sender does, most of the available utilities will quite happily eat copy-and-paste transfers.

So, what are your preferences when notating music using the computer? and why?

I'm a fairly unrepentant Finale user.   Sibelius has never really penetrated the Russian market,  so everyone I work with at all frequently uses Finale.  I find it very ergonomic - I tried Sibelius, but it drove me crackers.  There are a few things which don't quite work in Finale...  the ones which stick in my mind are  (i) the scanning utility still doesn't work (but frankly no-one expected it would)  (ii) adding an additional stave to your work later is a major pallaver and nothing moves into place as it ought to...  you end up having to respace the staves manually.  No matter what preference you choose for adding the stave (viz "add in orchestral order" etc) it still gets added right at the bottom below the double-basses. 

If midi voices bother you, there are a few more tiny gripes.  In v7.0 the midi voices seem to be a lot worse than they were in v6.0, but there is no way to copy them over from the previous version.   The most annoying is that you cannot (as far as I can see) mark pizzicatos in string parts that will play like that on the midi playback - they always play "arco", no matter what marking you've put in.  Frankly I only use Finale to prepare scores and parts for use by live musicians...  so these things don't really worry me, except when checking my own work.

Other than that, however, I think it is a super tool.  The SongText tool is fabulous, and extremely flexible.

Just make sure you have plenty of RAM installed to run it!   I have 1Gb of Ram (which is the max you can install on a Sony VAIO) and even then Finale grumbles a bit in longer pieces.  If you work a lot with it,  better to use a dedicated desktop machine and at least 2Gb of RAM.

Re automatic parts (ooh!) in Sib 4: unless they've fixed it, the problem (and it's a big one) is that if you fiddle with your parts, it fiddles with the score. It works both ways. So, lengthen a bar a bit for a page turn in a part, and it b******s up your score.
Of course it's a professional programme (the full version), so has to be flexible enough for pros - which in turn means that inexperienced users (students etc.) can make their stuff look appalling. But that's the same for any programme I guess...

Hi Jonathan

Yes, I tried Mozart, and I hated it from the very first moment. Who on earth could find it useful?  I suppose if your handwriting was really, really poor, it would at least make your work legible... that's about all

Thanks to Martle and Opilec for their ringing endorsements of Sib 3...  I am too deeply wedded to Finale (which does indeed hog disk-space) to change.  My answer is just to use big disks and back-up to SD cards now they've plummeted in price

Richard - the advantage for me of notation software is not an issue of practicality or convenience (as in part extraction, for example) but rather one of aesthetics.  The scores I create with Finale look and feel like I imagine my music looking, whereas my hand-written scores (though, admittedly, I haven't done any in well over a decade), ironically, don't really look like 'me.' 

You are, it should be said, blessed with absurdly lovely (and unique) musical penmanship.  We're not all so lucky. 

I use Sibelius (3).
I write everything by hand and then transcribe it.

My major irritants are:

irrational time signatures have to be fiddled

you can use your own fonts for unconventional notation (e.g. microtones) but there's no way of getting one of your symbols to function (and I'm not talking about sound or anything, in case you wondered) like, for example, an accidental.

simultaneous tempi are a real pain in the nether regions (especially adding the bar lines)

your score looks like everyone else's (to some extent) in a way that your handwriting never does

you can't beam two quavers together over a system break (though you can over a barline)

there are a few really annoying restrictions over things like lines and hairpins that seem to make no sense at all

There was something else but I've forgotten what it was. I decided at the beginning of my PhD to start notating everything on Sibelius, but I keep on thinking that I should try other programmes (I've got Lilypond but not quite got around to doing anything with it; I've looked at Finale but wasn't overly wowed) or go back to pencil and paper.
We'll see.

That's good to know.
Once this flaming PhD is done and dusted, I might have some time to think about this properly.