Scoring Notes

When Dorico arrived ten years ago, a hot topic around here was whether there was room for a third professional notation program. These days new music apps turn up in our inbox almost daily, and the prospect of asking an AI to build one to your own specifications seems considerably less far-fetched than it did even a year ago.

For this Scoring Notes round table, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald are joined by Ben Byram-Wigfield and Jason Loffredo. If it gets easier to build your own tools, what makes it worth paying for a program that somebody else designs and maintains?

For one thing, a notation program comes with opinions. Somebody has thought about where the dynamics should go and how much space to leave between staves. We’re glad to spend less time nudging things around the page, though a player with both hands occupied might have an opinion about where the software put the page turn.

There’s also the matter of whose software can read your score. Maestro and Denigma Online have given old Finale files a future we wouldn’t have predicted when Finale was discontinued. That gives us plenty to consider about MusicXML and MNX, especially if the number of programs we use to exchange music keeps growing.

Even LilyPond, whose text input has long seemed a little forbidding to those of us raised on graphical interfaces, deserves another look. An AI might be quite at home writing those engraving instructions. We’d still like a say in what comes out on the page.

What has changed most in your own work since 2016? Let us know in the comments.

Products mentioned

Notation software

Dorico (Steinberg), including the free Dorico SE

Sibelius (Avid), including the free Sibelius First

MuseScore Studio (Muse Group)

Finale (MakeMusic) (discontinued in 2024)

Maestro opens Finale’s .mus and .musx files and saves in .musx format.

LilyPond (open source)

Mentioned in passing: SCORE, Graphire MusicPress, and NoteWorthy Composer

File conversion

Denigma Online is Robert Patterson’s open-source converter for Finale files. Source code.

Extending Finale and Sibelius

RGP Lua, Robert Patterson’s Finale plug-in, and the Finale Lua script library

TGTools and the Easy Tremolos plug-in (Tobias Giesen)

Bob Zawalich’s Sibelius plug-ins

Keyboard Maestro (Stairways Software)

Playback, recording, and score videos

Musio Studio is the digital audio workstation from Cinesamples, the company behind the Musio sample library.

Cantai sings the notes and lyrics in a score.

NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments)

Glisscore makes a score video from a PDF and a recording in the browser.

AI tools

Claude (Anthropic)

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes

Background to the round table

Exposition, development, and recapitulation (Philip’s essay on ten years of Dorico and the decade in notation software, October 2026)

Q & A(I) and Q & A(gain) (the two 2026 listener mailbags, beginning with the questions about AI)

Sight-reading the inbox: 16 music apps on our radar (Philip’s November roundup of new music apps)

Maestro, Denigma, and Finale files

Maestro opens Finale files without Finale (our first look, October 2026)

Maestro: Finale’s next generation? (Ben Byram-Wigfield, October 2026)

Denigma Online solves the riddle of opening Finale files — without Finale (Jason Loffredo, August 2026, updated October 21 with support for legacy .mus files back to Finale 1.0)

MakeMusic ends development and availability of Finale and Finale’s coda podcast with Jason (August 2024)

Leaving Finale behind

History and the economics of notation software

An interview with Ben Finn, co-founder of Sibelius, part 1 and part 2 (2015, with Finn’s prediction about the professional notation market in part 2)

Back to the future of music notation on computers (podcast with Ben Byram-Wigfield, January 2022) and the companion post, A brief history of music notation on computers

Muse Group acquires Hal Leonard (December 2023)

Free Sibelius First now available (2018) and NAMM 2020: Interview with Daniel Spreadbury on the release of Dorico 3.1 and Dorico SE

Engraving, house style, and software design

Sibelius 6 is here! (2009, when Magnetic Layout arrived)

Dorico is here: A review (2016) and Dorico 1.1 is a major release (2017, when chord symbols arrived)

The elements of (house) style (podcast, 2020, on the “tyranny of the default”)

Behind “Behind Bars” with Elaine Gould (podcast, July 2023)

NAMM 2026: John Barron opens the door to Dorico’s future and the podcast interview with John Barron

Plug-ins, scripts, and automation

Conquering Finale with Jason Loffredo (podcast, 2021) and the Conquering Finale collection

RGP Lua is a powerful plug-in for Finale (2023)

Supercharge your Finale workflow on Mac with Keyboard Maestro (2018)

Plugged in with Bob Zawalich (podcast, 2021)

Playback and score videos

Cantai now sings straight from Dorico and Cantai 3.0.0 supports Sibelius

Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026)

Glisscore turns a PDF and a recording into a score video (October 2026)

File formats and archiving

NAMM 2018: W3C Music Notation Community Group meets; MNX is next

Music Notation Community Group reviews progress; discusses future MNX format (2021)

MOLA 2027 heads to San Francisco with Tech Fair 2.0 (where Philip and David will take up the archival questions)

Other references

Books and forums

Christopher W. White, The AI Music Problem: Why Machine Learning Conflicts With Musical Creativity (Routledge, 2025)

Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation (Faber Music)

Steinberg forums: Dorico

File formats and standards

MusicXML and MNX (W3C Music Notation Community Group)

NIFF, the Notation Interchange File Format (1990s)

Publishers discussed in connection with house style

Ancient Groove Music (Ben Byram-Wigfield)

Bärenreiter, G. Henle Verlag, and Boosey & Hawkes

Opening someone else’s notation file can take a little detective work. So can opening your own file from a year ago. After two 90-minute Q&A episodes, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald return for a (slightly) shorter conversation about figuring out what’s going on in a score before you start changing it.

David brings questions from helping his students; Philip brings his experience exchanging files with composers, clients, and colleagues. We start with the messages that appear when a file opens. There may be something useful in that dialog you just dismissed! Missing fonts, in particular, deserve a look before “OK fatigue” takes over.

Once the file is open, what are you actually looking at? A concert-pitch score or a transposed one? Where did that instrument go? We talk about making hidden information visible in Sibelius and Dorico, and checking whether a setting applies to one item, one part, or much more than you intended. Text styles, wildcards, and tokens get some attention, as do the various ways of showing the same music in different scores, parts, and layouts.

David describes a “fragile file”: change one thing, and something elsewhere breaks. That prompts a discussion of when to use the software’s more sophisticated features and when a simpler setup might be easier for a collaborator to manage. We also look at what to include when sending a file, from comments explaining an unusual choice to a reference PDF showing how it’s supposed to look, and the proofreading checks that can help before it goes out the door.

There’s plenty here for students — but we’re all students here.

Have you solved a notation problem whose cause surprised you? Tell us in the comments, or at podcast@scoringnotes.com. It may make it up the pneumatic tubes from the mailroom to the C-suite.

Products mentioned

Notation software

Sibelius (Avid)

Dorico (Steinberg)

Plug-ins for Sibelius

Check Redundancies (Roman Molino Dunn), included with Sibelius in Review > Plug-ins > Proof-reading

Find Irregular and Misfilled Bars (Bob Zawalich)

Relink Score Info In Dynamic Parts (Bob Zawalich)

Fonts, templates, and tools from NYC Music Services and Notation Central

Scoring Express templates for Dorico and Sibelius

Notation Express for Dorico

Norfolk and Pori and Lelandia fonts for Sibelius

Commercial music and text fonts at Notation Central

Other software

Microsoft Word and Google Docs

Affinity (Canva)

Avid Link and Steinberg Activation Manager

Time Machine (Apple)

Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes

Key signatures

All keyed up: Going keyless in your score — when to use an open key signature instead of C major

All keyed up: Keyless instruments in a keyed score

Styles, defaults, and overrides

The elements of (house) style — podcast, 2020

Importing only certain elements of house styles in Sibelius

Properties management in Dorico — why a score and its parts can look different

Score preparation and production notes — David’s checklist, including making front matter in a program like Affinity

Fonts

The point of point sizes — why 12-point type isn’t the same size in every font

Use the Tinos font as a metrically equivalent replacement for Times New Roman

Leaving Finale behind — tracking down missing fonts, and making sure you have the rights to use them

Dorico 6 review: Proof positive — includes Dorico 6’s change in how it handles font styles across platforms

Music fonts and open standards with Daniel Spreadbury — podcast, 2020

Wildcards, tokens, and exporting

Restore the link in File Info fields between score and parts in Sibelius — the title that stops updating in one part

Go wild with text wildcards

Finding missing staves and music

The focus is on staves with the Sibelius 2020.9 update and the podcast episode

Sibelius 2022.12 is “part”way to more layout independence with score subsets

Sibelius 2023.2 advances score subsets and dynamic guitar staves

Sibelius 2023.5: New hiding options make individually voiced parts possible from a condensed score

Sibelius 2025.2 introduces decondensing parts with staff filters

Condensing scores in Dorico

Using Dorico’s flows and condensing features to prepare Handel’s Messiah

Handing it off: setup, versions, and licensing

Don’t extract parts — the case for dynamic parts, for contrast with this episode’s case for separate files in some collaborations

The lowdown on updates — podcast, 2025

Sibelius updated to 2025.12; simplified upgrade path for perpetual licensees

Dorico 4, planned for early 2022, will be first Steinberg product to use new licensing system

Comments and proofreading

Take note: Comments in Sibelius

Note to self: post about Comments — from 2010, when Sibelius 6 introduced comments

Dorico 3 changes the score — where comments and replies arrived in Dorico

Sibelius plug-ins to help with proof-reading — Find Irregular and Misfilled Bars, Check Redundancies, and more

Dorico 6.0.22 extends proofreading capabilities

Score preparation and production double-checklist — podcast, June 2026

Score preparation and production checklist — podcast, 2020

Other references

SIL Open Font License

You sent more questions than one episode could hold, so we split them in two. Part one was brought to you by two letters: AI. This is everything else in the mailbag, from the practical side of the music notation software and technology world.

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald work through the rest of the mailbag: an iPad that won’t behave like a desktop, an app that has gone quiet, a singing plug-in that is rapidly evolving, world instruments that have to be taught to a notation program, a page somebody has to read at tempo, organizing a lifetime of files, keeping current with operating systems, and — perhaps the most practical question of all — our take in response to a question from a young copyist asking how any of this becomes a living.

The answers range over layout options and staff sizes, expression maps and subscription libraries, file metadata and backup schemes, security updates and Apple silicon, and a set of accessibility guidelines deserving of wider recognition. Believe it or not, there are a few things here we plainly don’t know.

Underneath most of it is the same instinct: keep the things you control in good order, and keep an exit from the things you don’t. Export the files. Learn the search box. Test the backup. Ask the player what size they can actually read. And never underestimate the value of a performance librarian in your corner.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. We take questions and suggestions year-round at podcast@scoringnotes.com.

Products mentioned

Notation software and apps

Sibelius (Avid) — desktop, iOS/iPadOS, Android and Chromebook

Dorico (Steinberg)

MuseScore Studio (Muse Group)

StaffPad

Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop)

forScore

SheetCue

Sample libraries, expression maps, and playback

Spotlight Collection (Native Instruments)

Phoenix Orchestra (Orchestral Tools)

ComposerCloud+ and the RA and Silk collections (EastWest)

Musio (Cinesamples)

Soniccouture

Art Conductor 26 Dorico (Babylonwaves)

NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments)

Hardware

Stream Deck (Elgato)

Steam Deck (Valve)

MacBook Neo (Apple)

Surface (Microsoft)

Files, backup, and organization

Airtable

Dropbox

Backblaze

LOCKSS — lots of copies keep stuff safe

NYC Music Services / Notation Central

Scoring Express

Notation Express

Norfolk fonts for Sibelius

Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes

The Q&A episodes

Q & A(I) (part one of this two-parter)

Half-time report: what’s new, and a call for your questions (the call that brought these in)

You have questions, we have answers (2025)

Asked and answered, part 1 and part 2: in awe of the DAW (2023)

Sibelius for iPad and mobile

The history and future of Sibelius for iPad (podcast with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak, August 2021 — the design rationale, in their own words)

Sibelius arrives on iPad (review, 2021)

NAMM 2026: An Avid Sibelius discussion with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak and the companion podcast

Comma sense: Command Search in Sibelius

Sibelius 2026.6 makes cross-staff notation no accident (auto-save on mobile, accessible touch navigation, Quick Look, Cantai support)

Sibelius 2026.2 cleanses the palette (dark mode and score colors)

StaffPad

StaffPad is a music handwriting app (March 2015, the original Surface release)

StaffPad wows with long-awaited iPad release and new free StaffPad Reader (February 2020)

David William Hearn and StaffPad (podcast, 2020)

StaffPad acquired by Muse Group; audio support planned (May 2021)

StaffPad brings live recordings into your scores with new audio update

StaffPad “captures” the imagination — and your piano performance

StaffPad updates go beyond just keeping the lights on (podcast with David William Hearn, November 2023)

Private equity exits Muse Group amidst MuseScore Studio leadership changes

Everything we’ve written about StaffPad

Cantai

Cantai now sings straight from Dorico (review)

Cantai 3.0.0 supports Sibelius; adds ensembles, Spanish language

Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026)

Dorico 6.2.20 released with Cantai vocal synthesis support and Dorico 6.2.30, which added independent Cantai voice playback

Sibelius 2026.5 adds VST3 support

Readability, page size, and accessibility

SheetCue turns your scores into a practice flow, part of our Overture series of first looks

Brief thoughts on the size of music paper

The point of point sizes

Orchestra librarians want you to know about parts and paper sizes

Archiving, file management, and backup

Get organized with music notation files (podcast)

Half notes: Jane Cross on keeping music files safe (the LOCKSS conversation)

File renaming and PDF Batch Utilities (podcast)

Restore the link in File Info fields in Sibelius

Exporting PDFs from Dorico with better filenames

Sibelius 2026.8 improves lines and cross-staff ties (macOS Spotlight support, including search inside .sib files)

Operating systems and platforms

Music notation software and macOS Tahoe

Notion Mobile 3.5 released with support for Linux, Windows on Arm devices

Finale’s twilight zone and Leaving Finale behind

Making a career of it

With freelancing comes responsibility (podcast with Paul Beck, August 2025 — the episode Philip refers to)

An interview with librarian Paul Beck

How to charge for music preparation

Welcome to the new Scoring Notes (how a Sibelius blog became this one)

Other references

UK Association for Accessible Formats: music, and their guidance on modified stave notation (PDF)

RNIB: modified stave notation

Windows 10 Consumer Extended Security Updates, now running through October 12, 2027

Using Intel-based apps on a Mac with Apple silicon — Apple on Rosetta and its retirement

StarCraft II

Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation (Faber Music)

We asked for your questions, and you sent so many that one episode couldn’t hold them. This is part one of two — and part one is brought to you by two letters: A and I. That wasn’t the plan; it’s just where the mailbag pointed.

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald take on the growing expectation that artificial intelligence should be able to turn a scan, recording, or generated track into finished, usable sheet music. Why is that still so difficult? And where can AI genuinely help musicians and music preparation professionals today?

The discussion ranges from optical music recognition and audio transcription to proofreading, house styles, sample libraries, score following, and the potential for language models to communicate directly with notation software. Along the way, Philip proposes the “Gould test” as the music preparation equivalent of the Turing test.

Underneath it all are larger questions about the value of expertise, the role of human judgment, and where responsibility lies when the technology gets it wrong.

The rest of the mailbag — the questions that have nothing to do with AI — is coming next month.

Products mentioned

Notation software

Dorico (Steinberg)

Sibelius (Avid)

MuseScore Studio (Muse Group)

Flat (Tutteo)

StaffPad

Scanning and optical music recognition

NoteVision (Muse Group)

Soundslice sheet music scanner

Newzik

PlayScore 2

SmartScore 64 Pro (Musitek)

Opuscan (Tutteo)

Audiveris (open source)

Audio transcription

Klang.io and Transcription Studio

Songscription

Basic Pitch (Spotify) (open source)

Magenta MT3 (Google) (research)

Playback and vocal synthesis

NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments)

Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop)

AI arranging and orchestration

ArrangementLabs

NotationAI

ScoreSynth

Orchidea (IRCAM / HEM / UC Berkeley)

Score following and page turning

Tomplay Smart Page Turn

Smartleggio

Piascore

SampleSumo Music Following

Antescofo (IRCAM)

MCP bridges (community projects)

mcp-musescore

dorico-mcp-server (also on PyPI)

Music generation

Suno

NYC Music Services / Notation Central

PDF Batch Utilities

Other tools mentioned

Name Mangler / Renamer

Claude (Anthropic)

Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes

Directly mentioned or closely related:

Half-time report: what’s new, and a call for your questions (previous episode — the call for these questions)

You have questions, we have answers (2025 listener questions episode)

Asked and answered, part 1 (2023, the first listener-questions episode)

Scanning the current OMR landscape (Steve Morell’s six-product comparison, December 2024)

A snapshot of music scanning apps — and picturing the future (companion podcast)

Dorico and The Rite of Spring (Stephen Taylor, January 2021)

The “rite” way to copy old scores into new software (podcast with Stephen Taylor, February 2021)

NAMM 2026: Sounding out the inputs with Klang.io’s Sebastian Murgul and the companion podcast

NAMM 2026: An Avid Sibelius discussion with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak and the companion podcast

NAMM 2026: Piascore’s bet on interactivity

Marie Chupeau and the human side of Newzik’s artificial intelligence (podcast, November 2021)

From zero to slice: Soundslice takes on optical music recognition with AI (podcast with Adrian Holovaty, December 2022)

Dorico 6: Proof positive (review — the Proofreading panel)

Dorico 6.0.22 extends proofreading capabilities (the “ignore issue type” feature)

Behind “Behind Bars” with Elaine Gould (podcast, July 2023)

Cantai now sings straight from Dorico (review)

Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026)

NotePerformer reverses course (the removal of third-party Playback Engines)

NotePerformer updated to 5.1.0

Comma sense: Command Search in Sibelius

NAMM 2025: Imbibing and transcribing with Oriol López Calle and the companion podcast (AI-assisted transcription inside a professional service)

PDF Batch Utilities get a major rebuild — and a brand new app

The rights stuff (podcast — rights and permissions)

Other references

Carlos Peñarrubia et al., “MuSViT: A Foundation Vision Model for Sheet Music Representation” — Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence Group, University of Alicante; posted June 30, 2026, accepted at ECCV 2026. Project page

Christopher W. White, The AI Music Problem: Why Machine Learning Conflicts With Musical Creativity (Routledge, 2025)

Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation (Faber Music)

NotePerformer: Playback Engines discontinued — Arne Wallander’s own explanation

“Detecting Notational Errors in Digital Music Scores” — research on automated score checking

Musicians’ Union arranging, music preparation and orchestration rates (UK)

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability — U.S. Copyright Office report

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald are back after a short break, and true to form, the conversation drifts from yard work and heat waves before landing on the actual business at hand: it’s time to open the phone lines again. For the third time — after 2023’s three-part marathon and last year’s round — Scoring Notes wants to hear directly from you, on any topic in the world of music notation software and related technology, or anywhere adjacent to it.

Send your question as an email to podcast@scoringnotes.com, or record it as a voice memo and send it as an email attachment or file-sharing link, or drop it directly here. However you send it, questions are due by Wednesday, July 22, 2026, and the best of them will form the basis of the next episode.

To get your wheels turning, the rest of the episode is a quick lay of the land for the first half of 2026. Dorico 6.1 and 6.2 brought a wave of guitar refinements and paragraph-level smart quotes, and picked up support for the Cantai vocal synthesis plug-in along the way. Sibelius matched that pace across three releases, capped by 2026.6‘s long-overdue fix for cross-staff accidentals, plus VST3 support and a restored dark theme. MuseScore Studio 4.7 rounded out its 4.x line with a much-improved ‘R’ for repeat, new parenthesis and bracket options, and its own Cantai support. For the full list of what shipped, plus lots more from Scoring Notes’ coverage of the first six months of the year, see our mid-year summer summary.

Cantai itself has moved fast since Richard deCosta joined the podcast in May: it now runs across Dorico, Sibelius, and MuseScore Studio, and pricing has come down substantially to a unified $9.99/month or $149 lifetime license, with new “Ottetto” choir ensembles added along the way. Full details are in our Cantai 3.0.0 coverage.

Finally, Philip previews news he’s especially excited about: the 2027 MOLA Conference heads to San Francisco, April 30 – May 3, with a reimagined Tech Fair that he’ll be producing and programming himself, built around a single throughline — the life cycle of a score. He’s inviting participation from anyone working in music technology, notation, publishing, or archiving, and floats the idea of adjacent meetups for groups like the W3C Music Notation Community Group, the MEI community, and the MIDI Association. Full details are in our MOLA 2027 announcement.

Meanwhile, get those questions in by July 22, and enjoy the rest of your summer.

Products mentioned

Notation software

Dorico (Steinberg)

Sibelius (Avid)

MuseScore Studio (Muse Group)

Vocal synthesis

Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop)

Organizations

MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians

W3C Music Notation Community Group

MEI (Music Encoding Initiative)

MIDI Association

Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes

Directly mentioned or closely related:

Asked and answered, part 1 (2023, the first listener-questions episode)

Send us your questions! (plus a classic episode) (2025)

Score preparation and production: a double-checklist (previous episode)

Some more summer summaries (full mid-year recap of news, reviews, and tips)

Sibelius 2026.6 makes cross-staff notation no accident

Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026)

Cantai 3.0.0 supports Sibelius; adds ensembles, Spanish language

MOLA 2027 heads to San Francisco with Tech Fair 2.0

NAMM 2026: An interview with John Barron (podcast)

NAMM 2026: An interview with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak (podcast)