Protege 2.0 (www.notionmusic.com, $69.95) is a music creation, orchestral scoring and performance program. It is the "light" version of Notion 2.0 (www.notionmusic.com, $499.95) a professional-grade music program. Protege 2.0, however, still provides enough features and tools for the budding or even seasoned musician who is starting to use a computer for music creation, scoring notation, editing and composition, and best of all, music performance--all at an affordable price.

Protege 2.0 does not teach you how to read or play music, so you will need to know the rudiments of reading and playing musical scores, staffs, notes, rhythm, dynamics and the like. The program will, however, improve your skills at reading music and provide you with a tool to explore music and to improve your sense of pitch, dynamics and tonality. The program may also change the way you listen to music, in addition to composing it.

Protege 2.0 starts by presenting you with a blank on-screen musical score. You decide which musical instrument you want to score for from a choice of 34 instruments, including piano, flute violin, clarinet, trumpet and several percussion instruments (the professional version, Notion, 2.0 provides more than one hundred choices, including sound effects). From here you select the time and key signature and begin composing. Composing is done by choosing what you want to place on the staff: notes of any timing (whole, half, quarter and so forth), with many variations possible, such as sharps or flats, staccato, tremolo, and the like. You continue by choosing from rests of several types, expressive dynamics (including 16+ levels provided from fffff to ppppp), slurs, crescendo and decrescendo marks (hairpins) and more. You’ll be able to play as you go to hear if what you want matches what you put on the score. If not, change anything and replay. This provides an easy way to explore variations and tune your ear.

Once you’re satisfied with the initial composition, you can play the score as is, with no intervention. Or you can play the score using the unique NTempo feature, where the music tempo follows your tapping on the keyboard, allowing you to add variations in tempo as the music plays. Think of it as a way of "conducting" your creation. Save the result as a file, and it will replay complete with tempo variations. Protege 2.0 supports text boxes, so you’ll be able to add notes, comments and other text material to the score. If your composition includes vocal scoring, the program can add a lyric track as well, making it easy to align the vocal with the music and easily make edits. You can also print the score for yourself or others to view and play.

Protege 2.0 has all the tools for everything from creating something as simple as a piano accompaniment for a vocal or solo instrument to scoring a complete orchestral background for a solo instrument. The program is useful for teaching, learning, practicing or performing music. Best of all, it gives you a greater appreciation for the wonderful inter-complexities of the music you hear, learn or perform . . . and you created it yourself. The program will accept input from a connected MIDI (musical instrument device interface) keyboard, easing the click or drag and drop placements of notes. A few of the many features that make composing easier are some shortcuts to automatically fill in repetitive segments, such as a measure full of rests, or cut/copy/paste to repeat part of a staff later in the piece or to add to another instrument. In the latter case Protege 2.0 will automatically keep the tone for the other instrument within that instrument’s range and/or adjust for concert pitch. Very cool.

The sounds of the various musical instruments come from orchestral samplings performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and recorded especially for Notion Music at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. Most programs of any sort of complexity that provide a wide range of capabilities have a learning curve for mastering the in-depth features, and Protege 2.0 is no exception. But help is extensive, with an excellent tutorial that covers the major features of the program, showing many examples, and encouraging you to try them. In addition, the tutorial includes some tips on using Windows itself (we learned a thing or two here about Windows). An extremely detailed on-line Help fills in the gaps, with complete explanations of all the features and many examples. Tool Tips help with some of the more obscure icons.

Although we were able to do very simple tunes a few minutes out of the box, neither of us are experienced musicians, so we had to keep scurrying to our musical dictionary for explanations of terms and usages. Once we got the hang of entering and editing, (admittedly at a superficial level), we had fun with the program and tried our hand at composing a short orchestral piece. The program includes several demo scores that allowed us to appreciate some of the complexities of orchestral works.

The software is suitable for Windows or Mac, but system requirements are pretty stiff for using Protege 2.0: Windows 2000/XP/Vista with 3Ghz Pentium IV, 1GB RAM; Mac OS 10.4.0+ 2GHz dual processor 1GB RAM.