Has AI wrought the right way to write a scorewriter?

When Dorico arrived ten years ago, a hot topic around here was whether there was room for a third professional notation program. These days new music apps turn up in our inbox almost daily, and the prospect of asking an AI to build one to your own specifications seems considerably less far-fetched than it did even a year ago. For this Scoring Notes round table, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald are joined by Ben Byram-Wigfield and Jason Loffredo. If it gets easier to build your own tools, what makes it worth paying for a program that somebody else designs and maintains? For one thing, a notation program comes with opinions. Somebody has thought about where the dynamics should go and how much space to leave between staves. We’re glad to spend less time nudging things around the page, though a player with both hands occupied might have an opinion about where the software put the page turn. There’s also the matter of whose software can read your score. Maestro and Denigma Online have given old Finale files a future we wouldn’t have predicted when Finale was discontinued. That gives us plenty to consider about MusicXML and MNX, especially if the number of programs we use to exchange music keeps growing. Even LilyPond, whose text input has long seemed a little forbidding to those of us raised on graphical interfaces, deserves another look. An AI might be quite at home writing those engraving instructions. We’d still like a say in what comes out on the page. What has changed most in your own work since 2016? Let us know in the comments. Products mentioned Notation software Dorico (Steinberg), including the free Dorico SE Sibelius (Avid), including the free Sibelius First MuseScore Studio (Muse Group) Finale (MakeMusic) (discontinued in 2024) Maestro opens Finale’s .mus and .musx files and saves in .musx format. LilyPond (open source) Mentioned in passing: SCORE, Graphire MusicPress, and NoteWorthy Composer File conversion Denigma Online is Robert Patterson’s open-source converter for Finale files. Source code. Extending Finale and Sibelius RGP Lua, Robert Patterson’s Finale plug-in, and the Finale Lua script library TGTools and the Easy Tremolos plug-in (Tobias Giesen) Bob Zawalich’s Sibelius plug-ins Keyboard Maestro (Stairways Software) Playback, recording, and score videos Musio Studio is the digital audio workstation from Cinesamples, the company behind the Musio sample library. Cantai sings the notes and lyrics in a score. NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments) Glisscore makes a score video from a PDF and a recording in the browser. AI tools Claude (Anthropic) ChatGPT (OpenAI) Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Background to the round table Exposition, development, and recapitulation (Philip’s essay on ten years of Dorico and the d