Melody Assistant!

MuseScore is a free music notation and composition software available for Linux, Windows and Mac.

With TuxGuitar, you will be able to compose music using the following features

Guitar Pro is first and foremost a program designed to edit tablatures for guitar, bass, and other fretted instruments from 4 to 8 strings.

Sibelius is the world’s best-selling music notation software, trusted by top composers, publishers, and students alike. With Sibelius 7.5, you can express, accelerate, and promote your creativity in more ways than ever before, enabling you to deliver beautiful, professional scores faster and share audio and video versions of your work—with stunningly realistic musical phrasing—to make your talent stand out from the crowd. It’s the fastest, smartest, easiest way to write music for live performance, film and television, media entertainment, or in the classroom. »

Finale is proprietary scorewriting software developed by MakeMusic, Inc. It displays music primarily in music notation and allows for multiple tracks and very specific tweaking of instrument sounds for each track.

GNU Denemo is a music notation editor that lets you rapidly enter notation for typesetting via the LilyPond music engraver. You can compose, transcribe, arrange, listen to the music and much more.

Music21 is a Python-based toolkit for computer-aided musicology.Applications of this toolkit include computational musicology, music informations, musical example extraction and generation, music notation editing and scripting, and a wide variety of approaches to composition, both algorithmic and directly specified.

Impro-Visor (short for “Improvisation Advisor”) is a music notation program designed to help jazz musicians compose and hear solos similar to ones that might be improvised. The objective is to improve understanding of solo construction and tune chord changes. There are other, secondary, things it can do, such as improvise on its own. It has also been used for transcription. Because rhythm-section (e.g. piano, bass, drums) accompaniment is automatically generated from chords, Impro-Visor can be used as a play-along device. Now having a wider array of accompaniment styles, its use is not limited to jazz. »

ABCJ is a pure-Java editor, player and librarian for music files stored using Chris Walshaw's ABC notation.

EasyABC allows you to edit and play abc files. It supports conversion from MusicXML and MIDI to ABC. The latter uses a custom implementation (midi2abc is not used) in order to produce very readable ABC output. Direct midi input is supported for people with a midi keyboard. It uses abcm2ps for printing music and abc2midi for playing it.

NtEd is a GTK+ score editor. It intends to be really WYSIWYG: what you see on the screen is exactly what you get on printer output. It supports up to 4 voices per staff, drum notes, 5 lyrics lines, N-Tuplets, context changes, repeats with alternatives, configurable music instruments per staff, MIDI / MusicXML import, PS / PDF / SVG / PNG / Lilypond / MIDI export. Scores can be played through the ALSA sequencer.

Canorus is a free cross-platform music score editor. It supports an unlimited number and length of staffs, polyphony, a MIDI playback of notes, chord markings, lyrics, import/export filters to formats like MIDI, MusicXML, ABC Music, MusiXTeX and LilyPond.

Band-in-a-Box is so easy to use! Just type in the chords for any song using standard chord symbols (like C, Fm7, or C13b9), choose the style you'd like, and Band-in-a-Box does the rest... Band-in-a-Box automatically generates a complete professional-quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar, and strings or horns.

Power Tab Editor is a free tablature authoring tool created by Brad Larsen for Windows. It is used to create guitar, bass and ukulele tablature scores, among many others. The current version uses the *.ptb file format.The Power Tab Editor is able to import MIDI tracks, and can export to ASCII Text, HTML, and MIDI formats. In addition, individual sections may be exported as bitmap files.The program allows for tablature scores to be created alongside standard musical notation. The software achieves this through the input of tablature.Each Power Tab file contains two scores: guitar and bass. Only one score needs to be used for a Power Tab file. For proper playback, it is required that the time signatures and tempo markers be consistent between the two scores.The latest version was released in 2000. In 2006, the author released an open-source wxWidgets based program named the PT Parser. This code contains useful information for developers who want to write software that can convert, view, play, or edit Power Tab (.ptb) files. The PT Parser project is hosted at Google Code. »

DGuitar is a Guitar Pro (*.GP4,*.GP3,GTP) viewer/player that works on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and any other operating system that has Java Runtime Environment 1.4 or later installed.