At its core, Notion is a powerful music notation tool. Basically, it transcribes music on the fly, allowing composers to quickly and easily get ideas down onto paper with the help of a MIDI keyboard or other controller. It also allows for fine editing of individual notes, and even step-recording (that is, note-by-note) to transcribe complex passages.
This all works as expected. The transcription is accurate, and step-recording and basic editing prove powerful and robust thanks to a suite of smartly chosen keyboard shortcuts. The software includes tools for transcribing guitar chords and tablature, and even offers an onscreen fretboard to help guitarists transcribe by sight. The bigger-picture controls that govern the basic setup of the sheet music are also fairly direct and powerful. This is all fortunate, since the whole point of Notion is to create professional-looking sheet music. And if you work within its basic parameters, it does this well. Compose via MIDI device directly into Notion and you’ll likely be satisfied.
Trouble is, Notion seems designed for this scenario alone. We were frustrated by our attempts at substantial hand-editing, thanks to a messy and counterintuitive select, move, copy, and paste system—a surprising gaffe considering the rich step-recording tools. That wouldn’t be such a problem if import and export weren’t also poorly implemented. For example, we transcribed a tune in Notion and exported it as MIDI, then imported that MIDI file into GarageBand, but the drum tracks weren’t the same at all. Each note triggered a different sound than what Notion played.
This is where Notion fails the “it just works” test, and without specific technical knowledge it’s not clear why it doesn’t. Even sending files to and from Notion for iPad (an additional $15 purchase), which is one of Notion’s marquee features, doesn’t work quite as you might expect: In our tests, the order of the instrument staffs got mixed up in the process, and page formatting appeared different thanks to the iPad version’s strict two-measures-per-page rule.
The bottom line. Now, many users may never need these ancillary features. If your goal is to transcribe a piece, make some small fixes to notation, and format the sheet music for printing and sharing, you'll likely be perfectly content with Notion's performance. But our experience with MIDI hit a sour note.
of 6
Notion 4.0
OS X 10.5 or up, 1.8GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 8GB disk space
Powerful transcription, step-recording, and page-formatting tools. Smart keyboard shortcuts for step-recording and minor editing.
More substantial editing is frustrating thanks to clunky UI design. Import/export is hit-or-miss. Huge install thanks to samples.
