MIDI, two questions about composing music

I once tried a version of noteworthy composer and was really impressed. It let me compose music by writing it in pure music notation, it is completelly old school, and i love it. You basically write your music sheet and can preview how it would sound in real life.

Do you guys know of other software to compose music like this?

Also, the cool thing is that you can choose from a range of instruments, pianos, violins, etc. The problem is that it sounds like a cheap fisher price toy piano. How do you do to create almost real sounding instruments? is it the software? the soundcard? what?

Sibelius:

http://www.sibelius.com/products/

I used it once. Can't remember when, or why, but it was very good.

I hate to burst your bubble but I hate the mid's generated by that.

any decent midi program will allow you to score. either step wise or real time.
(step wise is a pain.)
Cakewalk home or sonar will allow you to record step wise or real time midi
and if you so desire spit out the score in notation.

My personal favorite right now is band in a box. As it will spit out notated or tab or fake sheets. You can generate your own "styles" or collect them punch in the chord changes and it will spit out a melody backing parts and bass line based on the "style"
Right now I have about 1.000 styles. You can write your own melodies/progressions
assign to instruments or you can use the melody/soloist feature in biab to generate a solo baised on artist styles. (this is really cool it's not some generic keyboard comp melody)

I also have about 8,000 songs in biab format. which can be ported to .mid
.kar or .wav/wmv


You can as well interpert .mid's by importing the chord progression only
or import .mid

the industry standard right now for sequencing music is digital performer (mac based). Personally not a huge fan of DP but you can also use sibelius or finale to write the music then export the midi file. Then drop the midi file into protools/sonar etc. and set each instrument on a different channel.

You need to have a decent synth box to even get sounds at all worth while. This is expensive, which is why audio house can charge big bucks to arrange bad music poorly but without paying all the musicians. Really a bad deal for the music industry but so goes it.
-JWin

Cubase is alright, Logic is where its at.

sound fonts dude sound fonts.

Yup, cakewalk or cuebase... all good stuff :)

hmm. Going to give any of those a try.

I'm not looking at spending a lot anyway, as music is just a hobby. As I don't own a piano or keyboard, but wanted to learn amelie's soundtrack, good bye lenin and politika kousina's soundtracks, so I was thinking in back engineering them :p, therefore, just right the score, then print them, and go to a friend that owns a piano to be able to learn them.