Tabular!

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

OpenMPT (short hand for Open ModPlug Tracker) is a popular tracker software for Windows. OpenMPT is completely free and allows you to create and play back some great music on your computer. Based on the original ModPlug Tracker written by Olivier Lapicque, OpenMPT is free software and supports a wide variety of module formats and offers an intuitive, native GUI as well as advanced features such as VST plugins and ASIO output.

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

Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment.

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. »

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.

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.

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.

Songsterr is an archive of guitar, bass and drum tabs. It is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow music lovers. Anyone with Internet access can contribute new tabs and make changes to existing ones. Much like Wikipedia, contributions cannot damage Songsterr because the software allows easy reversal of mistakes and experienced editors are watching to help and ensure that edits are cumulative improvements. Begin by simply clicking the edit link near song name on tab page.

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.

Guitarix is a simple Linux Rock Guitar Amplifier for JACK Audio Connection Kit with one input and two outputs. Designed to get nice thrash/metal/rock/blues guitar sounds. There are controls for bass, middle, treble, gain (in/out), compressor, preamp, tube's, drive, overdrive, oversample, anti-aliase, fuzz, balance, distortion, freeverb, impulse response, vibrato, chorus, delay, crybaby(wah), ampselector, tonestack, and echo. For 'pressure' in the sound you can use the feedback and feedforward sliders. »

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.