OK, this is for a project I'll post more about later. A friend and I had the idea to make a computer zelda-esque 2D RPG. He's going to do level design, art, and music, and I'm going to do all the programming. As for a musical background, he's been in band for like four years so knows classical music notation and the like.

Anyways. What is the best program I can recommend to him for his part, writing all the music? What I (he) want(s) is to be able to place notes on a staff, and hit "Export as MP3" or something similar. Any ideas?

i suggest this as will many other people here im sure

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

free and works on windows and linux

Disagreed. LMMS is too hard to use for beginners, and not really great for what he's going for anyways.

I highly suggest using OpenMPT, it's what I use (partially for TaN): http://openmpt.org/ It's free, easy to use (compared to other out there for music tracking), and I love it. And of course it can export to just about any music file you could want (MP3, WAV, etc.). This is an excellent piece of software, if I do say so myself. I would start reading up on how to use it here: http://betawiki.openmpt.org/Tutorial:_Getting_Started , and then once you finish that, I would be more than happy to lend you some instrument samples to use.

As an alternative, an even easier to use one is Famitracker: http://famitracker.com/ it's even easier to get up an running with, but it only simulates the sound chip on an NES. It can only export to WAV and NSF (a file format for the NES), but I use it too to quickly get a rhythm drafted, or if I want to specifically make an NES/GB -sounding chiptune.