Programs like Noteflight and MuseScore are great software programs capable of a great deal, but can they produce professional orchestral scores? I’m not sure I can answer this question. Currently (at the date of this post), Noteflight still doesn’t place brackets around the orchestral group sections, lacks several articulations, and uses a non-industry standard sizing for staves and text. I started working again in MuseScore, and the same difficulty appeared around the sizing regarding the staves and text.
If you want to keep to the print standards of MOLA, the Major Orchestra Library Association guidelines using these notation programs become more complex, although not impossible. To follow the guidelines as they currently are written, the staves for the parts score should be 7.5mm from the bottom of the stave to the top. In Noteflight and MuseScore, the sizing options are slightly challenging to manage. Noteflight has a slider that moves from side to side to increase and decrease the number, but what unit of measurement does the number reference? Who knows? MuseScore uses a system where the slider adjusts the size in percent the percent of what?
On the other hand, more expensive programs like Sibelius make it easy to format pages because all measurements use the expected standard of measures, such as inches or millimetres. Using standard references for measurements makes formatting pages remarkably easy because paper sizes aren’t in pixels, picas, or percentages.
In Noteflight, I printed off a single stave on a piece of paper and measured it. It took a few tries, but I eventually got the staves the correct size to fall within the guidelines.
While you can save a lot of time in formatting when using more extensive programs, if you’re on a tighter budget, money will not be something you save.
