Music production software often abandons conventional notation, but to share your music with others, such notation is still the most universally acceptable form. Conventional notation is by no means simple and a program designed as a word processor for music, such as this, needs to be able to handle all the nuances of modern music and jazz, as well as classical forms.

Notation 2 is the work of Kurt Hofmann and is published by Magix and distributed in this country by FastTrak. It comes on a single CD with a thin manual that's more of a 'getting started' guide, and a more comprehensive document in PDF format. Both suffer from some hit and miss translations, presumably from the German.

There are three ways of getting music into Notation 2: you can drag notes, rests and other musical furniture from various toolboxes to the musical staves of a manuscript window, play the piece on the on-screen keyboard or through an attached MIDI device, or import a MIDI file and have it automatically notated.

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Some tasks that would take a lot of time and brain-power to do manually become a breeze with this program. Transposition, for example, is as simple as dragging a marquee to select the notes you want to work on and then dragging them up or down the stave. Notation adds all the sharps and flats.

There are some tasks that are more awkward than they need be, though, such as creating tied notes. The program's rather thin manual includes an example of this and it involves dragging the initial note in the tied pair onto the stave and extending its length numerically, using the note property dialog. It would surely be a lot more intuitive to drag start and finish dots into place and then to drag a tie between them, perhaps with the tie snapping to the notes in a Visio kind of way.

For those familiar with the first version of the program, new features in version 2 include cross-staff beaming, the ability to place notes in higher or lower staves than the working one. This is mainly useful in polyphonic scores.

You now have the ability to assign your own colours to notes when printing, too, which can be useful for teaching or to highlight particular passages. Finally, you can also use the Adobe Sonata font for print-outs, if it's installed on your system (it doesn't come with Notation 2).

While it may be a little ragged round the edges compared with programs like Sibelius 3, Notation 2 is also a sixth of the price. For most general purposes it's more than adequate for notating your music by hand or through MIDI.