When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sat down to compose, he had to draw off lines on a blank page and draw in his own music notes. Every change he made to a composition required erasing and redrawing notes as necessary, and if one bar was wrong at the beginning of the piece, he had to chuck the whole thing and start over. Often, movies depict those composers as very angry men rolling up paper and tossing it away. Now you know why they were so upset. Writing music by way of a computer program is a vast improvement to the manual compositions of old. The same way that the computer replaced the typewriter, it is replacing the old hand drawn notes on scale paper. You know how easy it is to change the writing on a page with computer data processing; the same is true with composition software. If you know anything about music, you understand that there are different timings for songs. The timing sets the tempo and flow of the music. A person writing music may decide to change the timing at some point in the process of writing. This means more or less notes in a frame of music. Again, in the old days, the composer would tear up his or her work and start over. On the computer, it’s a simple matter of keystrokes and rearranging the work that is already there. The notes themselves are like typing a letter. You simply choose what length note you want and where to put it on the staff. Depending on the software you purchase, you can stop at any time you choose in the composition and listen to what you’ve written, often choosing from several different instruments. Imagine writing a line of music and hearing it instantly. When the music is written, the words are added in proper context to produce a piece of sheet music suitable for any musician or singer to read, sing, and play. A composer can perform the work to see if it is suitable or have someone else try it and give his or her opinion. If something is not quite right, it is a simple matter to change it. Many of the great composers of today use this form to write because it saves time on the mundane parts of composition. Just think of the many additional volumes of work Mozart could have composed if he had this capability in his time.