Versión en Español

Notation Programs:

Finale - My personal choice. It gives you total control over every aspect of the score, which is quite useful, mostly when working with huge orchestral pages. It is about 600$ worth, but if you are a music student or faculty member,you can buy the theological/academic edition for about 300$. Still, if you have a tight budget, you can buy Allegro or PrintMusic, with are similar to finale, but less powerful (and, therefore, cheaper), or just download notepad, the freeware program by the makers of Finale

Sibelius - It is quite user-friendly, and the interface is very intuitive. Has some nice plug-ins, and playback sounds a bit nicer than finale´s. It is quite popular among composers at the rec.music.compose newsgroups, so if you are considering buying a notation program, these might the one you are looking for.

Igor Engraver - Igor claims to be a third generation notation program, and does have some advantages over Sibelius and Finale. It was originally written for Macintosh, and freeware, but later it was released for windows as an commercial program. I think it is a bit less expensive than Finale and Sibelius. Might be a good third alternative.

Lime - Lime supports Niff, with is a music notation format intended to become the standard. Lime works well with piano and chamber music, but I wouldn´t recommend it for orchestral scores. Lime is not free, but it can be tried out an unlimited number of times, without any functions disabled. Purchase it for about 60$.

Powertab - An excellent program to produce guitar tablature. Powerful and user friendly. It is widely used among the Internet guitarist community, and you will find Powertab files all around the Internet. Powertab imports and exports midi, and can also export your files to html or ASCII. You can find hundreds of Powertab files at the Powertab Archive. Powertab is freeware.

Audio Utilities:

Timidity++ - TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats. Timidity++ is a free software, distributed under the terms of GNU general public license.

To use Timidity++ you will need some soundfont banks. Sinfonia is a really nice soundfont for classical music. Another recommended soundfont bank is called Fluid, and you can get it from Hammersound.

Audacity - An Open Source and freeware audio editor. Interface is cool. Faster than Cool Edit. A good choice for tight budgets (like mine).

Lame - An Open Source Mp3 compressor. Install its Front-end interface, Razorlame, for easier usage. Razorlame comes with lots of presets that let you configure Lame easily to achieve different archives qualities and sizes.

PDF Utilities:

Ghostview and Ghostscript - If you want to publish your music on the Internet, you can easily create PDF documents using these freeware programs.

Make PDF - Another Freeware program. Make PDF works as a Front-end interface for Ghostview.

Software:

Sourceforge - Lots of Open Source programs and projects.

Pricelessware - Many state-of-the-art freeware programs for almost anything. Browsers, data recovery tools, web design, you name it!