MakeMusic! ships Finale 2005 music notation software

MakeMusic! today announced the release of its Finale 2005 music notation software, offering a variety of timesaving new features for educators, students, composers and publishers. Finale 2005 includes Finale Performance Assessment (FPA), which leverages the company's SmartMusic technology that can create music files which students can see and play in the revolutionary FPA application. Other new features include engraver tuplets, the ability to create SmartMusic Accompaniments, new Row-Loff Marching Percussion sounds, Human Playback enhancements, intelligent repeats, grace note improvements, and more. It is $600 with upgrades priced at $90 for a limited time. [upgrade pricing updated]

"SmartMusic technology has enabled us to give Finale 2005 a breakthrough education feature with its new Finale Performance Assessment," stated John Paulson, MakeMusic! President. "Teachers can now notate difficult passages from their band literature and make them into assessable and recordable assignments for their students. Students download the free FPA software, and then practice the assignments with special practice tools including a tuner, fingering charts, practice loops and more. Even before the first band rehearsal of the piece, the teacher can receive an FPA grade and recording of every individual student's competency and progress with the difficult passages."



FPA, now available as a free download, allows students to practice the music at any tempo, hear how it is supposed to be played, and even be assessed with red and green notes which show them what they did wrong and how to do it right. Students can also record themselves for instant feedback and self-evaluation. The recordings can be saved to disk or e-mailed to teachers along with the grade FPA gave their performance. A new SmartMusic Wizard makes it easier than ever to create accompaniments with advanced features for solo works, exercises, warm-ups, and more; users also can now combine multiple Human Playback styles in a single piece and edit the results with the Finale MIDI tool.

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