Hello Nigel,

Thanks for trying out Composer. You have run into a fairly basic limitation: Composer does not support tuplets other than triplets and quintuplets. One of your examples is three groups of three sixteenth notes in the span of a quarter note, which is really a 9-tuplet with additional beaming adjustments. Another example the 22-tuplet.

For your purposes, the lack of support of N-tuplets is probably sufficient reason that you would be better off choosing another higher-end notation program, such as Sibelius, at perhaps the cost of both a higher price and steeper learning curve. Some of our customers enjoy using both Notation Composer and Sibelius or Finale, where they use Notation Composer during the activity of actually composing or arranging music. Then they export the music as a MusicXML file; open it in Finale and Sibelius; and then polish off the score there.

Notation Composer is clearly targeted for the majority of musicians that have fairly common notation requirements, which Composer handles well. Notation Composer is well-suited for a wide variety of popular, folk, and church music styles. Notation Composer fall shorts of meeting some of the notational needs of 20th and 21th century classical music styles.

Eventually, Notation Composer will include support for N-tuplets, as well as some other fairly common classical notations such as cross-staff beaming, cross-staff phrase marks, and 3- and 4-voices (stems) per staff. However, near-term priorities for Notation Composer focus on even greater ease-of-use for everyday musicians, and more options for playback sound quality.

Sincerely,
Mark (developer of Notation Composer)