Notation Composer ranked by Top Ten Reviews to be the worst Music Notation Software

[Reinhold H.]

Hi ronaldstone, hi David,

Thank you very much for your support in this subject.

Today, Wed. March 7th, 2018 I sent a letter to Mr. Greg Mason, CEO from Purch (www.purch.com) which owns "Top Ten Reviews" and objected strongly to an assessment of Notation Composer which is based on Notation Composer 2.6.1 from almost 10 years ago.

I took the liberty and mentioned your statements here, too.

Again thanks for your supportive words. We try to do our best to meet our customer needs from all over the world.

Reinhold

[rrayner]

Reinhold,

That Top Ten Review is truly a travesty, an obvious miscarriage of public trust.

I have included below the text of the message that I sent to Mr. Mason. Perhaps if enough people complain about the unfairness of their review, they will revise it.

Ralph Rayner

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I would like to contact your CEO, Mr. Greg Mason. In your recent Top Ten Reviews of the Best Music Notation Software of 2018, you ranked Notation Composer very poorly. I understand from Mr. Reinhold Hoffman of Notation Software, Inc. that you reviewed a very old (in PC software terms) version of the product. I attended Berklee School (now College) of Music and spent 3 years on the Arranging Staff for the USAF Band, based in Washington, D.C. in the early '60s, under Sgt. Floyd Werle and Col. Arnald Gabriel. I have used Finale, Sibelius and MuseScore, and by far, I have been using Notation Composer for well over eight years now and find it to be the most user-friendly music notation application available, and with the exception of the free MuseScore, the most cost-effective means of creating music on a PC. Ease-of-use and intuitive usage compare very favorably to Finale and Sibelius (I have licenses for these products), which I find very difficult to use. Please consider redoing your review of Notation Composer with the current release, 3.0.6. Mr. Hoffman has made considerable advances/improvements on the product in the last few years, since he purchased the product. Certainly, release 3.0.6 would compare much more favorably to the competitors than did the old release you reviewed. I would be happy to send you a pdf/mp3/mid/html of some of the arrangements I have created with Notation Composer, if that would help you to see the value of the product. Please feel free to contact me. Thank you.

[dj]

I sent this to Top Ten Reviews today:

Sir,

I see that you have rated Notation Software's Composer at the bottom in your roundup of music notation programs. As a long-time composer for theatre (with more than twenty musicals to my credit), I must disagree vehemently with your appraisal of the program.

At the very least, you have used a more-than-10-year old version of that program to compare to much more modern versions of other software. I have no idea where you got the example that you tested. I have been a beta-tester of that software for longer than that software has existed and even I don't have a copy that old in my archive.

The latest version, Version 3.0.6, incorporates features such as MusicXML import and export, export to PDF, audio export to .wav, .mp3 and more, onboard configurable software sound source, and much more that did not even exist 10 years ago.

However, even from its first incarnations, Notation Composer (then Midinotate Composer) has been dedicated to, and has incorporated, an intuitive, easy to understand and easy to implement human interface that has made it a joy to use -- and not just by myself, but by many others. That approach to music notation has been developed over the years and is now very inclusive.

I have, on my hard drive, Sibelius 7, MuseScore, Lily Pond, Finale and numerous other notation programs, NONE of which have allowed me to accomplish any serious work.

I suggest you apply the 80:20 rule: 80% of the features for 20% of the price. Sibelius, the doyen of music notation software, costs (in my country) as much as $1,000 when all the tidbits are added in; Notation Composer less than $120. And yet, I have never run across a feature that I really needed and lacked in Notation Composer that was available in Sibelius. Other than, perhaps, the nice "parchment-y" background available in the expensive program.

Notation Software's corporate mission is to provide music programs for "the everyday musician", not those composing operas, film scores or (in my case) stage musicals. As testified by many glowing comments I have seen over the years on the company's forum, it does just that admirably -- and I also happen to know that at least one opera, one film score and (in my case) several musicals have been created using it.

A fair review of a modern version of the software is in order.

David Jacklin

[Reinhold H.]

The ranking of Notation Composer in the Top Ten Reviews is still a major issue for us. Any letters and emails which we sent out disappeared. Now I understand why. Purch, the mother company of Top Ten Reviews was acquired by a bigger UK company called Future plc (for the announcement of the acquisition see here).

The emails which were sent by customers as well as my letter to the Purch CEO ended in the nowhere, but Top Ten Reviews still publishes that crazy ranking.

I have touched based to the CEO of the new owning company Future plc to take immediate action. The new company is located in the UK which makes it easier to discuss the issue. I will use this thread to let you know about the status.

Reinhold