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carkins Offline OP
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I came across this song writing program and wondered if anyone else has used it or something similar.

http://masterwriter.com/mwtourfinal.html

Has a lot of cool features but is a little pricey ($9.95/month, $99.99/yr, $199 to purchase) for a hobbyist like myself.
Still the video is tempting and would like to hear from others on this subject.

I tried taking the free Berkeley Songwriting course by Pat Pattison

https://www.coursera.org/course/songwriting

but due to time constraints have been unable to keep up and complete the lessons.
Did download the videos and would recommend it to someone who wants an in depth look at all the factors that can go into writing a song.

Write On!
Carkins

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MasterWriter is certainly intriguing. Thanks for the heads-up.

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I bought a copy of it a few years ago. I personally did not find it very useful. The built in rhyming dictionary is really sparse.


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Hi carkins,

I've played around with Masterwriter but it's never impressed me enough to buy. The rhyming dictionary has developed in the last couple of years and it has a couple of features that make it useful for songwriters.

The above being said, the lyric software I prefer to use is Rhymesaurus. It is a brilliant rhyming dictionary and an ok thesaurus. It is extremely extensive in the types of rhyme and it's available words. The program also has the ability to look for words that have a particular number of syllables and whose lexical stress is located on a particular syllable. I couldn't be without Rhymesaurus.

I find that the combination of Band In A Box and Rhymesaurus is incredibly powerful.

Regards,
Noel


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Carkins,
A great contender in this space is TuneSmith and Rhyme Genie. TuneSmith offers more administration features than MasterWriter and also allows you to print chord sheets & lyrics.

It runs Rhyme Genie as a plug-in which is pretty much the mother of all rhyming dictionaries (300,000 entries, intelligent rhyme with plenty of compound rhymes, 50,000 song titles, syllable matching synonym…etc). They have a section online which compares the features to Rhymesaurus and MasterWriter:
http://www.rhymegenie.com/compare.html

The package costs $25 which is a lot less than MasterWriter.

Best,
Paul

Last edited by PaulMiller; 04/05/13 11:11 AM.
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I have used MasterWriter for a couple of years and it is excellent. I use it every time I sit down to write. It has lots of features I like such as Rhymes, Phrases, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Word Families, Parts of Speech and Pop Culture. Plus I use their Songuard service where I can submit my songs (lyrics and recordings) to their service for free and if I ever need to prove ownership I can retrieve validation from them for a small fee.

I have looked at Rhyme Genie and it looks pretty cool but you do have to kinda take that feature comparison chart with a grain of salt IMHO! Yeah, they include Feminine Pararhymes and Amphisbaenic Rhymes (and a bunch of other types) that the others don't but do you really need that (or even know what to do with it)?

BUT, with all that said, I will probably pick up Rhyme Genie because how can you go wrong for $25? Compared to the $200 I paid for MasterWriter that seems like an awesome deal.

Last edited by JohnJohnJohn; 04/05/13 11:33 AM.
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I have also used Rhyme Genie, and I think it's worthwhile, especially for $ 25.

Its registration procedure is one of the strangest I've ever seen, but once you get past that, the program works well.

John

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JohnJohnJohn,
I always found the idea behind MasterWriter's Songuard interesting but wonder how the service is different than uploading a song to any other online storage (iCloud, SoundCloud, Amazon…). As soon as you upload a file you pretty much established a 'date of creation' protection - or am I mistaken?

My main issue is that MasterWriter makes it not very intuitive to maintain song splits easily or even use pseudonyms. That is certainly something that TuneSmith excels in.

I agree that you can pretty much ignore most of the rhymes that Rhyme Genie offers. I pretty much stick with the intelligent rhyme and the family rhyme (which was actually conceptualized years ago in one of Pat Pattison's book if I am not mistaken).

The registration procedure is a little odd but what I like about it is that you can use the same serial number to activate Rhyme Genie on your iPad or iPhone as well as your computer. There might be an iPad version of MasterWriter in the works but so far a MasterWriter App has not materialized.

Best,
Paul

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I have an old version of lyricist I use, the program sells now for $59.95. I would suggest instead of going after a writing software, use either notepad or word (to me word is best for songwriting) and then open up rhymezone.com for a comprehensive rhyming dictionary. I hope this helps!


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After checking it out I went with Rhyme Genie.
Figure for the price and features it was a pretty good deal.
Thanks y'all for the input.
Carkins

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