Review: Notion 4 shatters your musical notation notions - frittsfeellen

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Many unique tools
• Great looking scores
• Inspiring look and feel

Cons

• Zero true drag and drop
• The practical piano, guitar, and drum pads can't atomic number 4 used straight off

Our Verdict

Notion 4 is a egg-filled-blown, unlimited and friendly musical notation editor at an entry-level damage.

When I get-go heard that Notion Music had born the price of its musical note editor in chief and scoring package from $249 to $99, I thought that the company was getting ready to stuffy shop and having a fire sale. Or they'd gone crazy. Plainly, nevertheless, the company's experience with the iPad version of Whimsey has convinced them that selling more programs at a lour price might earn them more money. Whatever the reason, it's skillful to know that the slickest score editor along the planet is safe, sound, and up.

Both the Notion interface and its onscreen notation are center-glaze.

The first thing you'll notice when you run Notion is how good-superficial everything is. The interface, the pages, the notation, the musical symbolisation palettes, etc. are all rendered in a very inviting manner. The programme simply makes you lack to compose.

It's also easy to apply compared to most of the competition. I have a traditional kick with the notation software industry's lack of true drag-and-drop editing. Notion doesn't support it either, but its editing methods are slightly more intuitive than those working by Sibelius, Finale, or MuseScore, so editing is easier with Notion.

Notion 4 has three first-class virtual instrument grids: a guitar, a piano, and a drum pad which allows you to enter notes. Opinion Medicine's more guitar-minded Progression featured a guitar, but these are unweathered to Notion. The piano and guitar feature a preview mode so you can adjudicate things before you enter them, and some let you figure melodies or chords. If you're instrument-dependent, these are identical usable features. The drum pad features a library of rhythm patterns you can drag to your seduce, but doesn't feature a preview style Eastern Samoa the piano and guitar features.

Sound is other of Notion's strengths. The musical group instruments were played by members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded at Abbey Road. There's roughly 6 gigs worth of them, and they sound very goodish. They even support most of the major articulations (staccato, smooth, etc.). Notion also supports Rewire and VSTi soh you can use third-party sample players, and in that respect are inline presets for popular symphonic libraries much as Miroslav, Garritan, Vienna, and EWQL.

Drum, piano, and guitar grids make entering notes easy for most everyone.

One reasoned caveat: While the program includes well-nig major instruments, lacking are any staples such as classical guitar and jazz horns. You can easily compose with what's there, only at that place are enough missing that you might be tempted to grab whatever sounds from Notion's expanding upon packs. These run from $70 for a single-instrument compact, to $370 for all the available sounds.

New nice facets of Notion are its broad support for guitar tablature (tab) and its unique sequencer staff. Notes appear along a staff, merely are molded same the notes you'd imag in a step sequencer. There's also a sequenator overlay which adds a velocity and duration shadow to regular notes. Belief also has a public presentation fashion, called NTempo mode where editing functions are disabled and performance features bear on the fore.

I do have some minor nits to pick with Opinion. I've already mentioned that there's No literal drag-and-drop. Others include having only whorl bars and the mouse wheel purchasable for scrolling the score (I'm non a wheel gentleman's gentleman), having to manually recruit alternate string tunings, and No way of life to change the keyboard shortcuts à la MuseScore. Also, it would comprise nice to be competent to enter notes from the grids while recording, which is apparently in the whole kit.

About the only area where Notion International Relations and Security Network't as mobile as the competition is in fine-tuning the placement of elements. Basically, it doesn't. IT creates wonderful-looking scores, merely if you want to move out a azygos accidental three millimeters to the left, you're out of fate. You can, however, change the overall spacing used by the automatic notation engine, which produces very nice-looking output.

Impression also features a full-blown mixer with effects.

At third (or less) the price of full versions of Finale and Sibelius, Whimsey 4 is steal and then just about. It sets no artificial limits as do the debut-raze Sibelius First, and Finale PrintMusic which are priced similarly. The only real competition at this price point is the autonomous MuseScore, which is as capable with the bedroc, if non nearly as elegant or full in note-entry tools.

Note: Notion was bought by Presonus and is now available from that company's Internet site for $150. Now at version 6.1, the program's major improvements are handwriting recognition and tight communication with the Studio One DAW, though other small-scale tweaks and perks abound. The look has altered slightly to match the company's other offerings, but it's still equally as friendly.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451601/review-notion-4-shatters-your-musical-notation-notions.html

Posted by: frittsfeellen.blogspot.com

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