Creating professional-looking musical scores on a computer has always been a daunting task. Traditionally, music-notation programs have been either too complicated, or simple but too limited in the variety of scores they can produce. Two professional notation programs, Coda Music Technology's Finale 2000 and Sibelius Software's Sibelius, attempt to find a middle ground between these extremes by offering comprehensive feature sets and uncomplicated interfaces.

They succeed to varying degrees. Finale 2000 is easier to use than past iterations and remains the most complete notation program available for the Mac. The slightly less comprehensive Sibelius is still quite capable and the easiest to use in its class. Finale has a well-earned reputation as the most feature-packed–and most confounding–music application made for the Mac. The program has always had seemingly endless tool palettes and layer upon layer of dialog boxes. The fact that Finale originally shipped with enough documentation to put a metropolitan phone book to shame didn't lessen the impression that the program was impossibly complicated.

While still complex, the latest release, Finale 2000, is easier to use than previous versions. When you launch the program, a setup wizard asks you to choose instruments for your score.

It creates the score's clefs and instrument transpositions based on your choices, and groups related instruments–strings, for example. Coda has also reduced the number of tools that appear in Finale's Tool palette and has made the program much smarter about spacing notes. However, Finale 2000's improvements comprise more than interface changes. The program includes 42 plug-ins that extend Finale's capabilities in welcome ways. The Piano Reduction plug-in, for example, lets you reduce any number of selected staves into a piano grand staff. Of course, the results are not up to the standards of professional transcription, but for quick and dirty piano transcription, it's not bad.

Produce the music of your imagination without compromise. No other music notation software offers Finale’s level of control, letting you decide both what and how you create. At every rehearsal, know that your score will sound great, your parts are ready, and you have clearly communicated your musical vision.

Split Point, another useful plug-in, lets you determine, in any selected region, where to divide notes between the two staves of a piano staff. Sibelius has received rave reviews for its ease of use on the PC and on RISC-based Acorn platforms. For the most part, the eagerly anticipated Mac version doesn't disappoint. Unlike Finale, Sibelius lets new users produce professional-looking scores with relative ease.

This is largely attributable to Sibelius's note-entry method. Like Finale, Sibelius lets you enter notes via a MIDI keyboard, but the program works best when you enter notes via the Mac's standard keyboard. Sibelius's interface is built around a series of five number pad-input palettes. The most common characters and commands are assigned to these palettes; this makes working with notes very easy. For instance, to enter a quarter note, you press F8 on the Mac's keyboard, press the 4 key on the number pad to select the quarter-note value, and click the note into place.

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