I've been a user of the competitor's "Noteworthy Composer" for more than ten years, but I really needed graphical editing of performance dynamics, so someone on another forum suggested I look at Notation Composer.

I downloaded the trial version and started playing with it about an hour ago. So far I'm in love with this program! Only a few minor nit-picks so far:

1. Using Garritan Personal Orchestra I can have up to eight instances of the player with eight instruments each, so I have several instruments using the same channel number, but on different instances. But when I assign, for example, flutes to "GPO Studio 1: channel 1" and violas to "GPO Studio 2: channel 1" there's a message in the flutes dialog, next to "channel", that says "shared with violas". But it's NOT shared, because it's on a different device.

2. When editing a score the whole concepts of "pages" applies to music printed on sheets of paper, not to music as performed. I'd rather have the option of seeing the score as one long horizontally scrolling document view. If I'm editing dynamics in a passage that lasts four measures I'd like to see all four of those measures on the screen, not two measures on this page and two measures on the next page. As a retired software engineer I understand if this is not compatible with the internal document structure, but it's something that would be nice to be able to treat the score as one long continuous flow.

3. It would be nice to be able to drag and drop the little green arrow at the top of the score to select a place to begin playing. Is the3re a way to position this?

4. When composing a new piece from scratch I have no idea how many measures it will have. Is this really necessary when creating a new score?

So far, this looks like a great piece of software and I very excited about learning more about how to use it effectively.

--gary shannon