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Creating a new piece in Igor brings up the Piece window. From there, new parts can be created by dragging an instrument from the Instruments window onto the small musician icon at the bottom of the Piece window. A new part is automatically created and can be edited by double-clicking its listing in the Layouts column. The instrument also appears in the Musicians column. By selecting a number of these instruments and dragging them to the left-most icon along the bottom, a score is created with the selected ones playing together. Parts can be added and removed from the score by dragging them into and removing them from the score listing. Items from the two lists can be removed entirely from the piece by dragging them to the trash icon.
Individual instrument parts can be created and edited separately in “parts” or together in “scores,” offering needed flexibility since a solo part, for instance, is composed differently than percussion. A part is self-contained and can be played, edited, or printed on its own. Because a score is simply a compilation of multiple parts, any changes will be reflected in both, allowing individual parts to be altered with or without other instruments present.
Input can be done in a variety of ways. In input mode, all musical elements from quavers (eighth notes) to slurs can be inserted through keyboard commands. Fortunately all of the elements are also available in the Input menu, especially handy for those less-used notational symbols. Outside of input mode, the mouse is used to add notes and symbols by selecting an element from the Tools palette and clicking at the desired location on the staff. Elements can also be selected and dragged to different locations, attached to other elements (a slur or sharp to a note, for instance), or altered in pitch (a note raised or lowered on the scale). Various editing commands can also be applied to selected elements via a contextual menu, accessible with a control-click.
Igor was designed to be as accurate and realistic with playback as possible. Through a process called humanizing, instruments are given a certain random quality. For example, trills aren’t always played exactly the same way, nor do grace notes play flawlessly every time. This reduces the synthetic quality of MIDI music but, of course, can be turned off if desired. The navigation buttons in the Play & Record window allow jumping to the beginning or end of the piece or advancing one measure or beat at a time. The record button provides the third input method: via a MIDI instrument such as a synthesizer. Both playback and recording capabilities require that Opcode’s freeware 
Besides serving as an excellent program for producing sheet music, Igor can also export parts or scores as a MIDI file, allowing composers to distribute music in a readily playable format. General MIDI may be the first format that comes to mind, but Igor can also save music for playback on various synthesizers which have much higher quality instrument libraries compared to software-based varieties such as the QuickTime Music Synthesizer. Rest assured to all web authors out there; Igor can also export MIDI files for conversion to QuickTime music files. However, from personal experience, make sure to select Multiple channel tracks and QuickTime Music from the popup menus. QuickTime will properly recognize all of the instruments when importing the resulting file later.
Lyrics are also supported in Igor pieces. They can be attached directly to notes via input mode or input into the Lyrics Editor, accessible from the contextual menu. Syllables are separated with a dash, and extension lines over multiple notes are produced with an underscore. Multiple verses can also be added. Again from personal experience, I find that some words are positioned too close together during input; so some minor nudging afterwards may be in order for maximum readability.