The music education technology specialists at MakeMusic! Inc. have released their Finale Guitar music notation product. Finale Guitar offers new features for guitarists and fretted instrument players, as well as file compatibility with Finale 2003, which was released earlier this year. Finale 2003 is music notation software for teachers, students, composers and other music professionals.
Finale Guitar includes a TAB notation feature that lets you enter music in a traditional staff and see it displayed automatically in a TAB staff — or vice versa. It comes with a library of special symbols and shapes used with notation for standard guitar or any of the more than 50 fretted instruments Finale Guitar supports.
The music notation software has a feature that lets you input notes with a MIDI guitar and see instant TAB notation. Its music scanning technology offers optical music character recognition for scanning sheet music and turning it into a Finale file ready for editing, printing or posting on the Internet. Finale Guitar also comes with a Rhyming Dictionary for searching all possible English rhymes for any lyric.
Finale Guitar, and Finale 2003, are available on the traditional Mac operating system (8.6 and higher) and in Classic mode under Mac OS X, but they’re not native to Mac OS X. Pricing structures for both products can be found online (http://www.codamusic.com/coda/shop_fin.asp).