MakeMusic has announced the upcoming release of Finale NotePad 2012, which will be available for free download on February 15, 2012. NotePad is music notation software that enables users to create, play and print sheet music.

“Finale NotePad fosters creativity and exploration by empowering students, songwriters, worship directors and other musicians to easily create electronic and printed sheet music,” said Karen van Lith, MakeMusic CEO. “Providing NotePad at no cost is especially exciting for music educators. Now their students can use NotePad for free to complete any assignment the educator has created in any version of Finale, MakeMusic’s flagship professional music notation software.”

Finale NotePad 2012 also includes select features new to Finale 2012, including Unicode font support (providing access to all characters in any font and facilitating the creation of music in any language) and aspects of Finale’s new ScoreManager, which simplifies the control of playback sounds.

More information can be found from Finale’s Community page, which offers access to the Finale Blog, Forum and links to Finale’s presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.