Guitar Pro 5

Guitar Pro is a favorite among guitarists for composing and sharing musical scores, and it has a resource-rich workshop for honing your guitar chops. But until recently, it was only available for that other operating system.

Guitar Pro 5's interface has a customizable general toolbar and three floating panels: the Tools window, featuring all of the score-editing options; the Play panel, housing your playback controls; and the Tracks panel, which lets you manipulate and swap tracks.

Composing in Guitar Pro 5 is fairly intuitive. Once you've entered the parameters of your score (key, mode, time signature, and so on) and set the track properties, you can start writing by entering notes on the software's fretboard or keyboard, or by playing a hardware MIDI instrument. Though Guitar Pro 5 is tablature focused, you can switch to standard notation to see the musical notes. Regardless of which system you use, any note you add to one is automatically copied to the other. You can also augment your score with guitar-specific symbols and effects.

Once your masterwork is complete, you can mix your tracks and listen to your composition via MIDI or, for a warmer-sounding performance, through the Realistic Sound Engine (RSE) live instrument samples. You can even mute a track and provide live accompaniment.

System Requirements:

• Windows® 98SE/2000/XP/Vista/7
• Pentium 4 - 1.7 Ghz ou sup
• 128 MB RAM
• Sound card - CD-ROM drive
• 700 MB free hard disk space