I can't complain about the price of free software, but one thing that really gets on my nerves is the registration process to download the program. Unlike most of the other developers here on Versiontracker, Coda software requires you to enter your email address and select a bunch of topics you are interested in before they allow you to download the software. There is NO available link where you can opt-out of any mailings on the survey-selected topics.

Frankly, I'm on enough mailing lists from people in Nigeria that want to send me a million dollars for helping them get some dead tycoon's fortune out of their country. I don't need yet another dozen unwanted spam mails sent to my email because the developers want to interest me in future products.

I strongly recommend the use of TempInBox rather than your own email address for procurement of this software. The URL is here: http://www.tempinbox.com/english/

As to the software itself, I didn't use it, since I'm not the composer. My wife did, and was very pleased with the ease of use. There are a couple of quirky bugs: when trying to copy and paste the entire song, for some reason only the first two and a half pages of the four page song were transferred, so she had to re-enter the last bit.

I would also like to see a feature added where the name and composer of the song can be edited from within the song. The reason she had to cut/paste was because when I set up a test song, it was with a random name and composer. Not realizing that she'd be stuck using that as the title and author, my wife transcribed her entire song into the software, and THEN had to open a new document and try to move the transcribed music to it once she'd given it the proper title and composer name. It's minor, but it added about a half hour's work to the project.

There were also some relatively miniscule installation issues since I was installing to a multi-user computer. Make sure you install this to the admin user's folder first. I installed to my wife's folder, and then the program wouldn't run without the registration code (sent by email). Entering the registration code in her account did nothing for the software in my account, and required a de-install and re-install from the administrative user account, which propagated to all other accounts in the system. This could be an OS:X issue or a software issue; I don't usually install to my wife's account so it's difficult to be certain.

It's good software, and I recommend it, but I hate viral marketing and demanded email registrations for things that are "free." Take those away and I'd happily tack a five start review onto this.

~D.