How quickly technology changes our lives. Even in an art form thousands of years old, technology continues to find ways to change and improve on our old ways of writing music. Still, most of the software out there for composing music is expensive and out of the reach of many novice composers.

Since I first wrote my Guide To Recommended Free Music Writing Software back in 2009 I have seen countless versions of these free music composition products trickle through the Internet, each one hoping to claw their way to the top of the music writing software heap. I have used each one of them, and have some very detailed opinions on each one.

Forte Free Freeware Notation Software (Windows only)

Compared to some of the other free and low cost music notation products the Forte Free provides a lot of useful features and abilities. It offers up to eight staves of music and up to three lyric verses in each composition and has some nice features that are not always seen in free music writing programs such as the ability to export the composition to WAV format. The program also offers a built in percussion notation font as allowing the user to use other music fonts as needed. It even allows the user to include chords and fretboard diagrams in the music as well as to import MIDI files.