For years, I've been using Passport Rhapsody to do music composition and arranging. At the time I bought it, it was reasonably inexpensive, it did what I needed, and (most importantly) it ran under OS/2 Warp. When I finally dropped OS/2 and moved to (ugh) Windows, Rhapsody came along, and worked pretty well.

Until I upgraded to a new motherboard. My old video card wouldn't fit in the new motherboard, so I had to buy a new one. And a couple of programs (GIMP and Rhapsody) started crashing regularly when I tried certain operations. One such operation, in Rhapsody, was adding text — an operation I performed fairly frequently.

So, for that reason among others, I bought a new video card. And the problems persisted. Given that Rhapsody was originally a Windows 3.1 program, I figured it was probably time to upgrade. So I went to buy Rhapsody's bigger (and more modern) brother, Encore, which was now owned by G-VOX.

The only problem was, G-VOX didn't respond to emails, and they didn't answer their phone. A search through Google and Google Groups revealed that they had been incommunicado for several months now; they wouldn't even respond to people who wanted to buy their products. Not a good sign.

I went looking for alternatives. The big name in music notation software, of course, is Finale, by Coda Music Technologies. Along with the big name comes a hefty price tag — $600 is the usual cost for Finale. Checking their site, I discovered that they had some less-expensive products (such as Allegro, for $200). But looking at the complete feature comparison, I saw that Finale had many features which I need, features which were lacking in the others.

Eventually, I stumbled across a link on their site which led to a "competitive trade-in offer" — turn in the master disk from certain other notation programs, and get Finale for $199. To my delight, Rhapsody was one of the eligible programs, so last night, I downloaded the Finale demo and played around with it. The interface is less intuitive than Rhapsody's, but it's better than the first (Macintosh-only) version of Finale, which I'd encountered back in college many years ago. And it could import Rhapsody files, which will save me a lot of work if I need to re-arrange something (though the importer is less than perfect).

So, since I do need a notation program that won't crash on me, I mailed off the Rhapsody CD this morning. Out of curiosity, I emailed Coda tech support and asked if it was possible to create lute tablature with Finale (as it does have guitar tablature support). I just received a reply telling me to wait a couple of months before buying Finale, as the next version should do everything I want and more. D'oh.