Scorewriter
Software for writing, engraving and printing sheet music — the word processor of the score.
The job is harder than it looks. Music engraving carries centuries of typographic convention about where stems, beams and accidentals go, and a program has to understand the music and lay it out well. Finale from Coda Music Technology arrived in 1988 and dominated for years. Sibelius started in 1993 on the Acorn Archimedes and became the rival. LilyPond took the other road, having users type notes as text and leaving layout to a compiler.
In 2016 Steinberg released Dorico, written by the team Avid had laid off from Sibelius. In 2024 MakeMusic discontinued Finale and told its users to move to Dorico — unusually candid for a vendor. MusicXML is the format that makes the move possible, with varying losses.