Musescore

Rant mode on. It's been about 2 weeks since I sent in my laptop for servicing (display no backlight) and it is still not back. I've had laptops in for servicing before, the worst (or is it best?) experience I've had was with Acer - I had to send in my laptop about 5 times over the course of its life, but the repairs were done within several hours, or once, when something major happened to the logic board, next day! (and they actually swapped my mobo to a high spec one since they were out of stock of the one used in my laptop)

This is my 2nd apple laptop (first one was splendid and had zero issues. Sold it as I wanted something smaller/faster), and I can't say I'm pleased with the service so far. I actually got an email a week ago saying it was ready for pickup, but when I was there, it displayed exactly the same issues >.> I must give credit to the store personnel, they were very friendly and attentive.

Two weeks is somewhat long, and I'm seriously considering just getting a windows machine and Cubase just so I can use a DAW! Was quite annoying this week the day before my composing class (we use skype) and I realized - I did NOT have a machine capable of skype video! Thankfully the class was done perfectly fine with just skype screen sharing*. But still. Gah!

In any case, I still have to do my composing homework even without my mac, and used two approaches, musescore and noteflight. The former is an open source notation program, and in certain areas I think it is actually nicer to use than Finale. Mouse input for one makes so much more sense vs Finale. Noteflight provides online notation input with your web browser. The free version I use has its limits, but it's perfectly great for when I have a half hour during lunch time to input notes in the browser, then continue to refine them at home on a full fledged notation package.


*skype actually works pretty darn well on linux, the screen sharing was not as good as on osx (tearing, much less resolution), but for "free" software, it is difficult to complain, and I think it is frankly quite amazing.