StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So I'm working on a project for school, and as part of it I am composing a sample theme music piece. It's a sort of orchestral/heavy metal fusion work, and while I can cover the guitars well enough for my purposes, it occurs to me that the brass, woodwind, and symphonic percussion MIDI emulation sucks flaming donkey cock, even with my fairly decent SB XtremeMusic soundcard. Computer synth is totally fine for my purposes (as if I could afford an orchestra anyway, ha), but shitty MIDI crap is unacceptable.

So, I need some serious music software, and it needs to be good. Free is great, but I'm willing to pay a pretty penny for something which will be of enormous benefit to my future music projects.

Chiefly I am looking for something which:

• Has a decent GUI
• Runs on Windows
• Has good sound and quality for brass, woodwinds, strings, percussion (timpanis, chimes, marimbas, cymbals, etc)
• Will allow me to easily integrate guitar, bass, and rock drum tracks
• Can record and output to .wav/.mp3, etc

I'm looking for quality here, so if anyone knows anything or has any ideas, I would appreciate it greatly.

Cubase is generally considered the industry standard, but it costs a bomb. There is a feature reduced version, Cubase Essential that's also a lot cheaper; it really depends on what your needs are.

I should also mention that it requires a hardware dongle to work; the newer ones are generally pretty good though from what I've heard, and don't have the compatibility problems that older versions did.

EDIT: There's also an even lower-end product by the makers of Cubase which I wasn't aware of... it's called Sequel, and actually has a trial download available. You might want to give it a spin and see if it's any good.

when I had to do a similar project i used sibelius, its pretty user friendly

http://www.sibelius.com/home/index_flash.html