Feels like Finale
Simple Entry and Speedy Entry, the Main Tool Palette, Page View and Scroll View: years of habits still work.
Music notation editor
Maestro is a music notation editor designed for people coming from Finale: enter notes quickly with the keyboard or MIDI, listen, and print score and parts.
Version 1.7.0Free, with no limitations!For Mac, Windows and iPad
Opens and saves
- Finale .musx .mus
- MuseScore .mscz
- Guitar Pro
- iReal Pro
- MusicXML
- MIDI
- LilyPond
- MEI
- Scans (OMR)
- PNG and SVG
- M4A and WAV
What it does
Everything you need to go from an idea to a printed score.
Opens your files
Finale (.musx and .mus), MuseScore (.mscz), Guitar Pro, MusicXML and MIDI scores become Maestro documents, ready to edit, and go back to Finale as .musx when needed; iReal Pro songs become lead sheets with chord symbols. Finale’s fonts are built in.
Hear it as you write
Playback with performance styles (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, jazz) that play like a musician, General MIDI sounds, mixer, swing and metronome; export to M4A or WAV, including backing tracks without your part.
Score and parts
Automatic layout, parts with cue notes, guitar and bass tablature, your choice of music font. Print-ready PDFs and PNG or SVG images.
Made for gigging
Setlists as a single PDF or audio, tuner, tap tempo and a visual metronome.
Helps you arrange
Analyze chords, harmonize a melody for a horn section, check instrument ranges.
Coming from Finale? Here’s how to switch to Maestro Coming from MuseScore? Open your .mscz files Have Guitar Pro files? Open them with their tablature
Beyond Finale
Maestro does the tedious part.
Things you did by hand in Finale, or not at all: Maestro reads paper scores, finds the chords, plays along with you and keeps the page tidy.
From paper to score
Scan or photograph a printed score and Import Scanned Score turns it into notes you can edit: it first straightens crooked pages and cleans up the background, then recognizes them with Audiveris. Correct it with the original scan alongside, which highlights the measure you’re working on.
On Mac and Windows, not in the Mac App Store version. PDFs exported from a notation program open directly.
Maestro finds the chords
Analyze Chords reads the notes and writes the chord symbols, with tensions and inversions: G13, C7(♭9), C/E. From those symbols, Harmonize Section spreads the melody across the saxes or the brass, in block voicing or drop 2.
A band that plays along
From the chord symbols, bass, piano and drums back you up while you practice a solo: swing, ballad, bossa nova, funk, salsa and more, with a fill at the end of each section and an ending. Write into the score turns the accompaniment into real staves, ready to print.
A page that tidies itself
Dynamics, hairpins and expressions rest on the notes instead of sitting at a fixed height, so they don’t collide with them. Staves move apart where something sticks out, nearby dynamics line up, and two voices on one staff make room for each other. Everything can still be moved by hand.
Mixer and tuner
Mix the band, tune your instrument.
Two studio tools, always at hand: they open with the two buttons at the end of the playback bar.
Mixer
A studio console with a channel for each instrument: sound, pan, reverb, mute and solo, fader and stereo meters, plus master, metronome and reverb. Right-click to type exact values, copy settings from one channel to another and pick each channel’s color; the look can be customized, light theme included. You hear it at once, even while the score plays, and the settings are saved in the score.
Tuner
It listens to the microphone and shows the note, the frequency and how many cents sharp or flat you are. Pick the reference A and the transposing instrument, to read the note as it is written in your part.
Piano roll
Your notes, the way a recording app shows them.
View → Piano Roll shows the score as bars over a keyboard: look at it, listen to it and fix it by dragging notes, and the notation rewrites itself.
Edit with the mouse
Move notes up and sideways, stretch them from the edge, copy them, create new ones with a double-click: the measures you touch turn back into notation, with ties, rests and spelling in the right place.
Note-by-note velocity
In the lane at the bottom, set how strongly each note plays, even by drawing a crescendo: it applies to playback, MIDI and audio, with no extra marks in the score.
Drums and notes as played
Drums on their own become an editor with one row per sound; trills, staccatos, arpeggios and swing show the way playback plays them.
Made to measure
Dark or light theme, colors by instrument, velocity or voice, separate time and pitch zoom: right-click, just like the mixer.
Up close
See Maestro at work.
Every part, ready to print
From score to parts in one click: each instrument has its own layout, with multimeasure rests, rehearsal marks, dynamics and cue notes.
Handwritten, like a real book
Document → Fonts… changes the music font and every kind of text. The Jazz handwritten style uses Finale’s fonts, which come with Maestro: notes, chord symbols and names look written by hand.
Start in a minute
Pick a template (jazz combo, big band, string quartet, SATB choir and more), change the instruments as you like and start writing.
Virtual instruments
Play on screen, and Maestro writes it down.
Below the score, a panel follows the instrument: piano, drums or a guitar neck. A click plays the note and, while you write, puts it in the score.
Piano
88 keys: a click plays and, with Speedy or Simple Entry, writes. While the score plays, the keys light up in each staff’s color.
Drums
On a percussion staff you get a drum machine: one pad per sound, which plays and writes the hit and lights up in time.
Guitar and bass
On guitar, bass and ukulele you get the neck: pick a string and fret and the note is written right there, tablature included.
View → Panels → Virtual Instruments (⌥⌘J; Ctrl+Alt+J on Windows), on Mac and Windows.
MIDI keyboard
You play, it becomes a score.
Plug in a MIDI keyboard: write note by note with Speedy Entry, or record as you play and Maestro transcribes it, even with both hands. No keyboard? Sing or play into the microphone.
Where music happens
Play, write, listen back.
On the sofa, on the living room rug or in the rehearsal room: write the idea down as soon as it comes, with your computer keyboard, and hear it right away.
- Aleatoric boxes that play: in playback the content of the box repeats as far as the arrow reaches, and with «ca. 10''» in the text the passage lasts that many seconds. With «Notes spaced freely, without barlines» the notes of the box are evenly spaced, independent of the other instruments, with no barlines inside the box. Boxes written to .musx come back as boxes when the file is reopened.
- Mark colors: Document → Mark Colors… colors rehearsal marks, Segno and Coda, D.C., D.S., Fine, endings and boxed texts all together or group by group, with a preview and suggested colors; a single mark is colored from the Inspector. The colors also apply when printing, in PDF, in parts and in MusicXML.
- Compound dynamics: from the dynamic's Inspector you can add words before and after («più p», «p sub.»), a second dynamic after a dash («p – mf») and parentheses («(mf)»), written and moved as a single mark. Finale expressions like «subito p» or «sempre ff» open this way, and they carry over to MusicXML, LilyPond and MEI.
- «rit. - - -»: a Text Line with rit., rall. or accel. writes a tempo marking followed by a dashed line, above the system and in every part, and in playback it slows down until the end of the line.
- Rehearsal marks and tempo markings can appear only above chosen staves, with «Only above these, not at the top of the system» in Rehearsal Mark…. A rehearsal letter and the text that starts with it share one line («A Medium Swing ♩ = 120»).
Follow us
Maestro on Facebook, Instagram and X, too.
News as soon as it lands, previews of upcoming versions and tips for writing music faster.
Why trust it
Free, but made seriously.
Signed by Apple
The Mac app is signed and notarized by Apple: it opens without warnings.
Your data stays yours
No account and no data collected: Maestro only goes online to check for updates.
Constantly updated
134 versions since 29 September 2026, the latest on 10 November 2026. Maestro updates itself.
Your scores aren’t locked in
You can always export them as MusicXML, the open format read by Finale, MuseScore, Sibelius and Dorico, and as .musx to reopen them in Finale.
Is Maestro really free?
Yes: no limitations, no subscription and no account, on Mac and Windows. And it will stay free.
Who makes Maestro?
A group of musicians who are also developers. We wrote music with Finale for years and, when it was discontinued, we wanted to keep working the same way: that’s where Maestro comes from, and it grows with the feedback of the people who use it.
Is Maestro still growing?
Yes: since version 1.0 Maestro is ready for everyday work, and new versions with features and fixes keep coming out and install themselves. If something doesn’t work, write to us: every report helps.
What computers does it run on?
On Macs with macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple Silicon or Intel; on PCs with 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, with an Intel, AMD or ARM processor. A score saved on one opens on the other.
Does it open my Finale scores?
Yes: .musx files and older .mus files too, from Finale 1.0 onwards, without Finale installed. Finale’s fonts are included, so the score opens looking the way it should. MuseScore (.mscz), Guitar Pro, MusicXML and MIDI files open as well.
Does it open iReal Pro songs?
Yes: share a song or a playlist from iReal Pro in iReal Pro format and open it with Open, or paste a copied iReal Pro link. It becomes a lead sheet with chord symbols, form, style and tempo, with the accompaniment already on. You don’t need iReal Pro.
Can I take a score to another program?
Yes. Maestro saves in its own format (.maestro); Export Finale (.musx) in the File menu reopens it in Finale with its layout, and Export MusicXML takes it to MuseScore, Sibelius or Dorico. It also exports PDF, MIDI, audio (M4A or WAV), PNG or SVG images, LilyPond and MEI.
Do I need internet or an account?
No. Maestro works offline and without signing up: it only goes online to check for updates, and it collects no data about you or your scores.
Can I use a MIDI keyboard?
Yes: enter notes one by one with Speedy Entry, or record while you play and Maestro transcribes, even with both hands. Without a MIDI keyboard, write with your computer keyboard, the on-screen piano, drums or guitar neck, or by singing into the microphone.
Can it read a paper score?
Yes: Import Scanned Score recognizes the notes in a scanned PDF or in photos of the pages with Audiveris, free and open source, which Maestro downloads the first time. Always check the result, with the original scan alongside. It works on Mac and Windows, but not in the Mac App Store version.
Can I use it with a screen reader?
Yes: with NVDA, JAWS and Narrator on Windows and VoiceOver on the Mac, Maestro tells you every note you enter and where you are in the score, and it works from the keyboard. All about accessibility →
What languages is Maestro in?
Maestro is available in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. By default it uses the system language; to change it, pick one under Language in Settings.
Ready to write?
Maestro is free, for Mac and Windows. Download it and open your first score in a minute.
