Program you use for composing MIDIs?

[KommisMar]

I am in the market for a new MIDI sequencer, but I'm having trouble finding one that meets my needs and I'm curious as to what all of you use.

I'm a mediocre piano player, and I'm too cheap to invest in a MIDI wind instrument or guitar knowing that it may not work very well. What's worse, I have tried the whole piano roll thing, and it just doesn't work for me. I can't visualize music any other way than by looking at a traditional score. So, I use a program that allows me to input notes onto a score then export as MIDI for tweaking in a second sequencer (I'm using Reason for that job, currently - if only all music programs were so intuitive).

That program is an antiquated hunk o' junk called ConcertWare. It's a Windows 95 program from 1996, which I bought just months before the company that produced it went out of business. ;-) It's not terribly stable (though miraculously it runs better in WinXP than it did in Win98), and it's not robust at all as a MIDI sequencer - but it allows me to do what I want, which is drop notes onto a score, play them back, then export it as a MIDI file.

The program is missing lots of features that I would really like to have. Just as a few examples...

It can't swing 8th notes. The graphic design is so horrible that you can only view a few measures and lines at once. There is no easy way to audition instruments. You can only use instruments from the GM set. You can not pan instruments or use any MIDI controllers such as vibrato and reverb. And so on...

I would really love a robust MIDI sequencer that is also a robust score writer. Is there such a thing?

So, what do you folks use, and why? I'm interested in knowing, even if your method of inputting music isn't the same as mine.

[Tom]

I have no experience with "score writing" software; don't really want anybody composing for me, anyway.  The two longest standing and top of the line software sequencers are from Cakewalk and Voyetra, and both have comparible features.  If you're interested in mixing MIDI tracks with digital audio tracks, than the 'pro audio' or 'digital' versions of these sequencers would be suitable.  But it sounds like you want somthing other than a sequencer; something that 'fills in' music for you?  On that score (pun intended), I wouldn't know.

As for me, I've used the same four software sequencers for years:  Two from Voyetra, and two from Cakewalk.  My wife uses Personal Composer as well, but that's more geared for notation rather than sequencing, though the later versions have beefed up the sequencer end of the software.  VERY expensive, but does an excellent job notating your music.  We've used Tracs, Ballade, and quite a few others over the years, but for sequencing MIDI data, we've found the old DOS version of Sequencer Plus Gold (which is free, by the way) to do everything we need, very quickly and easily.

[KommisMar]

Notation software. That's the term I was looking for. I think that ConcertWare might have some functions that "fill in" your music, by automatically making chords and such, but I've never used it.

The method of inputting music is pretty clever if you're not a keyboardist - you use a graphical keyboard at the bottom of the screen to play notes, which then appear on your score. I recently bought a Creative ProdiKeys keyboard to try and speed this process up, but I'm such a poor piano player that I don't know if it helps or hinders me.

Here's a screenshot showing a work in progress:

http://www.msu.edu/~artmanja/cwscreen.jpg

I might take a look at Personal Composer. The price is a little off-putting, but looking at the website, it does seem pretty feature-rich.

[loh]

I use Voyetra - MIDI Orchestrator Plus  that came with AWE32.