Forte is a

music notation program A scorewriter, or music notation program is software for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they typically provide flexible editing and automatic layout, and pr ...

developed by the German company ''Lugert Verlag'', located in

Handorf Handorf is a municipality in the district of Lüneburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany. The headquarters of the music publishing company Lugert Verlag GmbH who produce the Forte scorewriter A scorewriter, or music notation program is software fo ...

. Its name is derived from the dynamic marking of '' forte''. The program is available in both German and English.

History

The Lugert publishing house, which developed the Forte software, had its beginnings in 1981 when Wulf-Dieter Lugert and Volker Schütz were preparing

popular music Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training.Popular Music. (2015). ''Fun ...

for higher education courses. The use of popular music in the classroom was unusual in

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

at the time. In 1998 the principals formed a publishing house, which subsequently became known as ''Lugert Verlag''. The firm later diversifie, producing magazines and audio media and selling musical instruments. Forte, their score-writing program, was first released in 2005.

Functionality

The program can import

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

, MusicXML and karaoke files, as well as the ''CapXML'' file format of the Capella notation program, and can export songs in

and MusicXML formats for sharing with other tools such as the open-source MuseScore and

LilyPond LilyPond is a computer program and file format for music engraving. One of LilyPond's major goals is to produce scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules, reflecting the era when scores were engraved by hand. LilyPond is cross-pl ...

programs. It also allows users to save music scores as JPEG, TIFF or EPS files. Three of its tools include the ''Music Ruler,'' which allows users to enter notes; ''the audio sequencer,'' which allows users to record or import audio and play it in conjunction with their composition; and the ''complex scores,'' which allows users to write elaborate pieces. Recent versions of the program feature the ability to automatically transpose notated music among various keys, while their ''ScanScore 2'' module performs optical music recognition on medium- to high-resolution PDF, JPEG, TIFF or PNG files of music score images, generating reasonably accurate MusicXML input for further processing within the main Forte program; this feature, however, is only available in the company's Premium edition.FORTE 11 and ScanScore 2 – Sheet Music Digitized
6 Nov. 2019, ScanScore. Accessed 25 April 2020.

Versions

Forte is available in several editions, with the more expensive Premium edition implementing full functionality while the Home and Basic editions have more limited capabilities, such as the number of staves, voices and verses supported. An education edition and a specialist version designed for hymn and worship music are also available.

Notes

References

External links