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?