Respectful Standard and playful Jazz music fonts are provided, and there's a wide-ranging bundled sound-set running to over 8GB, with orchestral samples by the LSO, guitar samples by Neil Zaza, and bass and drum samples from brothers Victor and Roy Wooten. On the face of it, all the important boxes are ticked. Now, though, Notion Music want us to think of Notion 4.0 on Mac and Windows as a real alternative to the big boys - and at a fraction of the cost. The few open-source notation applications out there show promise, but tend to be pretty 'niche' and not well documented or supported. The alternative has traditionally been various 'lite'-version, low-cost or DAW-bundled solutions, all of which are inevitably much more limited in scope. These behemoths have not been without their controversies in recent times, too, with company restructuring and product focus shifts eroding confidence in their continued existence in the minds of some users. MakeMusic's Finale and Avid's Sibelius have traditionally satisfied the needs of both camps, and others besides, but only for a hefty outlay in initial purchase and ongoing upgrade costs. A publisher, by contrast, might not need sounds at all, but instead will demand the ultimate in typographical flexibility and printed output quality. Composers often want great quality sounds and score playback features, for experimenting, developing compositions and producing demos. I've said it before in the hallowed pages of SOS, and I'll say it again here: notation is a funny old business, and what different individuals ask of notation software is amazingly diverse. Version 3 was reviewed in March 2010 ( /sos/mar10/articles/notion3.htm) and the new Notion 4, reviewed here, introduces plenty of further improvements. Dave Stewart looked at an early version of Notion back in the October 2006 issue of Sound On Sound ( /sos/oct06/articles/virtuosoworks.htm) but, as you'd expect, a considerable amount of development has taken place since then. The company are based jointly in North Carolina, USA and London, UK, and were previously known as Virtuoso Works. Notion 4 is a notation and score playback application for Mac OS, iPad and Windows, developed by Notion Music. Is Notion 4 the first to tick all three boxes? Some score-writing packages are affordable, some are powerful, and some are easy to use.

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