Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny didn't compose his latest album 'The Way Up' using paper and pen but instead, like so many composers, he did the job with Sibelius 3 on his Apple Mac.

Sibelius is chuffed to bits that it has won the Queen's Award for Innovation, but as there are only two companies scrapping it out in the music notation software market (that's Sibelius in London and Finale on the other side of the pond in Eden Prairie, Minnesota) it is fair to say that Sibelius is a national champion.

We haven't previously used either the original Sibelius or Sibelius 2 so we came to Sibelius 3 with fresh eyes (and ears), and it is clear from the outset that this is a hefty piece of software with plenty of features that lie just off the beaten path. The basic package costs an alarming £595, although the Student edition is far cheaper at £116.33 (£99 plus VAT), so it comes as no surprise that many secondary school kids have some familiarity with Sibelius software.

Sibelius 3 includes PhotoScore Lite, which is a scanning package that is effectively OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for sheet music, and it also includes Kontakt Player Silver for playing your compositions back on your PC. Where Microsoft tends to buy up companies that catch its eye and then amalgamate their technologies into its products, Sibelius has opted for marketing tie-ups with companies that have associated products, so if you go to the Sibelius Web site you'll find that you can upgrade to PhotoScore Professional for £199 or to Kontakt Player Gold for £175, or you can buy a bundle of packages at a discount.

These aren't Sibelius products but instead come from Neuratron and Native Instruments respectively. There's another Sibelius add-on that may be of interest. Sibelius Speaking from Dancing Dots for $289 helps blind people to control Sibelius and was used by the late Ray Charles.

You can start working with Sibelius by opening an existing MIDI file, which is likely to come from a guitar or keyboard, or you can scan in music using PhotoScore, or you can start with a blank sheet. Although the software has been fairly neatly integrated, the transitions aren't as smooth as you might like, so if you want to scan some music into Sibelius with PhotoScore the process is slightly clunkier than using a plug-in with an application such as Adobe Photoshop.

When we opened a MIDI file in Sibelius, which had been created on a Yamaha PSR-3000 keyboard, the notated sheet looked a complete mess. The problem is that Sibelius notates the music exactly as it is played, so any note that is slightly slow or fast is reflected on the screen. We put in a call to the support desk at Sibelius and learned we could change a setting to increase the shortest note that the software recognises from a semi-quaver to a quaver and once we'd done that the screen looked far tidier.

We hit the playback button and came across one of the new features of version 3 which is Live playback. This is enabled by default and tries to play the score as the software thinks a human would play it, and for our tame free jazz pianist it worked very well as there is a significant difference between the way that the score appears and the way that she plays it.

This suggests to us that playing back a file in Sibelius 2, which doesn't have Live playback, would have sounded very stilted for some types of music. We were unimpressed by the sound quality of the playback as the PSR-3000 isn't listed in the library of instruments so we had to select a generic Yamaha sound instead. If you play a very simple piece Live playback makes no difference at all and this highlights the fundamental problem with music notation software as it has to cope with a huge variety of demands.

There are musicians who want to save themselves the hassle of writing out a piece of music, and then there are those who want to write music but who aren't particularly skilled musicians. They will find the step time feature to be a life-saver as they can build up the music note-by-note and chord-by-chord if necessary, but they may also want to use Flexi-time which means that Sibelius adjusts the metronome to follow the speed of the musician.

You know that bloke who busks 'Hey Jude' in the street and keeps getting lost somewhere in the middle? He needs Flexi-time but it drove our pianist absolutely potty until she turned the setting to Straight (as she can count, so when she plays around the beat it's deliberate, rather than an error).

The big changes come when you are working with a blank sheet and have to do an arrangement for a band or orchestra. Select an instrument, compose the part and then play it back. When you're happy you can select the next instrument, copy sections if you want, transpose them to another key and select where you want the page breaks to fall.

This is where the real strength of the software comes into play, as you can build up an arrangement very rapidly - always provided you have the musical ability, of course.

There's a rule of thumb which says that most software houses don't get a product right until version 3, but while Sibelius 3 has all of the functions that you could reasonably hope for it still needs some work to make it user-friendly. We hesitate to say that the full retail price is extortionate but it is certainly steep, however this is a powerful piece of software that serious composers should buy without hesitation.