Finale+Printmusic

INSTRUCTIONAL SOFTWARE REVIEWS

1. CITATION AND GENERAL INFORMATION • Title: Finale PrintMusic 2010 • Publisher: [|MakeMusic, inc] • Copyright Date: 2010 • Platform: Macintosh, Wintel • Peripherals: Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, MIDI instruments, and Scanners are supported but not required • Grade/Age: Finale PrintMusic can be used by all students, but is primarily aimed at High School grades and older. • Type of Class: Primarily Composition, Theory and General Music. But can be used for Band, Orchestra, and Choir.

2. TEACHER SUPPORT • Documentation: There is an online manual and quick reference guides available [|here] • Resource information: all information, can be found on [|Finale's Website] Additionally, PrintMusic contains "QuickStart Videos" which are tutorials to help beginers with using the program, and provide tips anyone can access.

3. INSTRUCTIONAL CONTENT

This is a music notation program. With it you can compose, arrange and/or transpose pieces with up to 24 different staves. You can extract the parts, print the score and/or parts, play them back through midi, and "print" as a .pdf document.

• This is a very full-functioned version of finale, with very few limits when compared to the full version. The main differences, in addition to the 24 Stave limit, are that PrintMusic has fewer available staff lines (1 or 5 as opposed to 0-100), fewer availabel fonts (only 3 as opposed to 7), and fewer predesigned templates (31 instead of 68).


 * National Standards Addressed
 * Standard 4: Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines.
 * Standard 5: Reading and Notating Music.
 * Standard 6: Listening to, analyzing, and describing music.

4. INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AND PEDAGOGICAL SOUNDNESS

• Print music was not designed as an educational software, but is very useful as a resource or tool for a teacher to use in preparing their class. • While its interface does have a learning curve, all student can learn to use it. One limit is that often finding the correct tool for some of the functions is not intuitive, though there are plenty of help options both within the program and on the finale forums.

PrintMusic can be used in Discovery based activities by allowing students to compose, input ideas and then play them back. It could also be used for Problem Solving instruction if the teacher poses a question and the students then use finale to simulate or enter it in to find a new solution.

A teacher can also adapt PrintMusic into their instruction through using it to generate musical examples or pieces for the class to use. In such a fashion, PrintMusic could be a valueable aid in many different kinds of lessons, activities and learning.

• Sequence of Materials: Good • Quality of Interaction: Good • Motivation for Students: Excellent

5. RECORD KEEPING

In addition to printing a copy of your work, you can save files in a variety of formats, including as a .mus, a .pdf, and as midi or other audio files. Additionally, you can share your file with anyone through Finale Reader, a free program available from their [|website].

6. OVERALL EVALUATION • Finale PrintMusic is a very good alternative to the full Finale program ($600 for a new copy, $350 with education discount). It is not as expensive as the full program, but has most of the features that are used the most. Only advanced features such as the ability to save your files as a SmartMusic accompaniment, and some sound patches are missing from this product. Most professional composers/arrangers would probably never even need most of the features that are not available in this version of the product. At its current price ($99.95 for a new copy) It is still considerably more expensive product than Finale NotePad ($9.95 for a download, 19.95 for a CD-ROM), but it contains far fewer limitations. It is a product that I would recommend to anyone who is looking for music notation/composition software, you get a lot for a "reduced" version of their flagship product.

Rating: ++++

7. Robert Adamson 06/16/2010