Music notation with capella Pro v.6 (capella Pro 2008)

This latest version of capella has been written to work with Microsoft Vista. It is also compatible with earlier versions of Windows, going back to Windows 98 SE. If you have earlier versions of capella and are planning to change to Vista this new version is highly recommended.

New features include:

• An improved Score Wizard. With the new wizard you can combine instruments and voices from different groups, for example if you click a piano from the Keyboard group you can add SATB voices from the Vocal group. If you put these in an illogical order capella will automatically rearrange them into the order traditionally found in chamber music scores, orchestral scores or pop music scores (depending on which option you choose).
• Tempo control is now much more flexible. The tempo can be changed at the beginning of every note or rest. If you mark a block of notes you can insert an accellerando or a ritardando. The capella tune playback module also allows you to change tempo during playback with a slide control.
• The capella tune module. This has had a number of significant enhancements. You can freely define the way in which dynamics, articulation and types of phrasing are to be played back. There is also support for twenty-five pre-defined tunings such as Equal Temperament, Hermode and Pythagorean. Each of these tunings has a description of what it is, plus all the settings which you can vary if you wish. Trills and ornaments have standard playback settings which you can add to.
• capella now supports VST plugins. This provides an interface to sample sound libraries from other suppliers.
• Bar numbering can now be applied anywhere in the score.
• New symbols have been added to the capella music font. These include nineteen different trills, mordents, turns etc.
• Transposition has been made more flexible for people working with large orchestral scores. As well as the existing full range of transposition options there is a filter which allows you to select the whole score and then untick boxes for instruments you do not wish to transpose.
• There are many minor but sometimes invaluable improvements such as broken barlines, forced accidentals which can now be attached to a tie, triple dotting of notes and the ability to set the alla breve symbol to 4|2 time s well as 2|2 time.
• A useful improvement to the layout controls is the ability to add negative value to the distance between staves (as well as the existing method of adding negative distance to lines of music). This feature and the ability to specify a variable right hand margin for any line of music in the score means that special effects such as coda and incipits are now easily achieved. The result is two separate lines of music appearing side by side on the page.
• The existing support for exporting your score as web pages is enhanced by an option to embed a playable midi file with the score and to include the corresponding capella file for download. The free capella reader means that even non-capella users can view, print and play back the score flexibly.
• MusicXML import and export is now supported, allowing you to exchange files with Finale^tm users and Sibelius^tm users, with minimal layout problems. Unfortunately Sibelius only imports MusicXML and does not curently export MusicXML