Crescendo Music Notation

I needed something to write up my part from sheet music, and then have it play it back to me so I could learn my part in a show. I jumped right in, wrote out each song, all the notes and markings.... exported a .mp3 and now have my own personal musical director to play my part till i learn it. It was super easy with an intuitive set of tools. I know I only scratched the surface of what it can do. For a software that is free to download, totally worth a try.... for sure!

I went through a couple of music writers like this, all with the same sort of headaches, then I read za.peterson's note about not wanting to spend $200 for Logic Pro, and duh, I already use Logic Pro, and it does everything I want perfectly easy. Plus I can record my songs on it like a pro. Had this years ago and got rid of it. Thought it might have improved, but it still takes a long time to get notes put on. When mouse slips and note is on wrong line, not easy to grab it to move; instead the program prints another note so I have to delete back to the point of insertion and be more careful with putting it on. I found that adding notes or changing notes between measures seemed to cause problems with playback. It's as if the program wants to read the notes in the order they were applied rather than the order in which they're placed. The keyboard usage isn't clear as far as signifying a time for the note being added. And when I add my iRig25 into the equation, I was surprised it even worked, but same problem with note lengths plus for every one note I play on the iRig, Crescendo prints two notes side by side. So, the big reason I tried this again is to be able to put lyrics and chords (though I haven't figured out the latter again yet) with the music to make a simple lead sheet. I use Logic Pro X to play the melody line and get the notes pretty much in place, but I've yet to see a way to include lyrics with it. When that happens, Crescendo is out the ports. All in all, it's nice, and if you have a midi that works seamlessly it's great, and if you need all the depth of the music that it offers, it's fantastic. But for me, to do the simplest of tasks quickly, it does not fit the bill.

I have used Notion notation on my iPad for years, but they don't have anything for my Mac, so for my simple goals, I decided to give this a try. All I'm doing is entering music to make an MP3 to use as accompaniment for my early childhood students. This works pretty easily, in that it's point and click to enter notation. However, there doesn't appear to be a way to sustain a longer note under moving, shorter notes. Also, the play back separates chords as if they're glissando. I can't stand it.

I used this program while taking my Music Theory Course at Southeastern Louisiana University. It helped me get a 98 on my final project. I just told my teacher about it.

I’m a working composer who is just getting into writing music on a mac - new software and older hardware (older but still useable). I’ve been working with Crescendo Music Notation Editor for the past two weeks and have found it useful overall. While the application isn’t able to do some of the musical notation I want, overall Crescendo is good and helps me stay organized. I’m hopeful that when I get the full version, I will be able to use the application to it’s fullest capabilities. I found that this version of Crescendo was easy to install - I donwloaded the file and the application installed quickly and easily. There were a couple of problems I encountered but they were easy to figure out workarounds. Because I’m very familiar with music theory, musical scores, music notation and how to compose, using Crescendo was very easy to get started. However, if you don’t know how to write music, Crescendo may be overwhelming. It isn’t an application to “teach” music, it is an application to “write” music. You must have a background in music to make the most of Crescendo.

If you don't want to spend the $200 for Logic Pro and only need to transcribe, use this. However, it isn't that user friendly.