Finale is an industry-leading music notation software used by composers, arrangers, performers, educators, and students to create and share professional-quality scores. It offers a comprehensive set of tools for creating, editing, printing, and sharing music notation. Finale's powerful editing tools make it easy to create music notation with precise detail. With its intuitive and flexible layout, you can customize your score to fit your needs and style. Finale also offers a wide selection of instruments, sounds, and effects to help bring your music to life. Finale also offers powerful tools for sharing and distributing your compositions with others, including the ability to export to PDF, MusicXML, MIDI, and MP3 formats. Finale is the perfect choice for anyone looking to create professional-quality music notation.
MuseScore is a very capable alternative to Finale. It is easy to use and produces professional scores of any size. I have created small scores for a single instrument as well as large scores for a full concert band with this software. Finale has a better sound library than MuseScore, but other than that, MuseScore has handled everything I've thrown at it.
It does not work properly and is much less than similar to Finale.
You have full control over the engraving and score editing process and the results are the best available.
LilyPond uses text files, while Finale uses MIDI, .kar, etc.
Discontinued The last software release was published on February 20, 2006.
I only had MuseScore for a few days, but it seems like a very solid and powerful program. There's nothing cheap about it ... and it's free.