You can plug your MIDI keyboard, horn, or guitar into a number of wallet-emptying programs and - as long as what you play isn't too complicated and if you stick strictly to the tempo given by a click track - they will try to write down what you play. Playing musically - slowing down and speeding up and swinging your rhythms - yields a mess. This has nothing to do with the programs and everything to do with the fact that music notation and performance are distant cousins. If you play music the way it's notated, it sounds dead. If you notate what you really play, it's unreadable.
Encore 3.0 provides a better way: inputting your masterpiece a note at a time rather than in real-time. You can play in real-time and it will fudge notation as best it can; but it is much less frustrating to enter notes one at a time on the MIDI keyboard with one hand and type durations with the other. That way you write what you mean, not what you happen to play.
Encore will play notated music on synthesizers, record and playback accurately in real-time, and produce very good looking music notation. Lyrics, guitar tablature, automatic chord parsing, and a lot of other stuff is in there.
Encore is probably the easiest to use of the professionally capable music programs, and that's what plays my tune.
- Jef Raskin
Encore, US$595. Passport Designs Inc: +1 (415) 726 0280.
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