

Noteflight: start-up that lets you compose music within your browser - unalone
http://www.noteflight.com/info/learn_more

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11ren
A really nice idea (though music composition is pretty niche, that might be a
good thing). The score looks beautiful.

But too hard to start using. It took me 10-15mins to discover how to enter a
note: you have to click where the cursor is. And not just where the cursor is,
but _slightly to the right_... I had to read the help, and it wasn't even the
first thing!

Entering a note is the very first thing a user wants to do. For user adoption
(which is the what you need when starting), you have to make that first thing
incredibly easy: click somewhere, get a note. All the additional
sophistication should be additional to that. (IMO)

I think they are aiming at existing users of existing tools. But I think
that's too hard - they can't beat desktop applications on their own turf.
There's a lot of sophistication in the tool - so it's like they are aiming at
what the professional applications do. These tools have competed and evolved
to meet the needs of professional composers. However, I think a web tool is
really in a different market, with a different proposition. They should first
focus on where they strong. It's Writely vs. Word.

Music layout is hard, and their's gets messy when it's more complex (looking
at Moonlight Sonata).

The fact that you can't publish to the web, or share (except with people who
are already members) makes it harder to get started. Maybe not allow the whole
score to be viewed without an account, but a tempter, to entice get people to
sign up for the rest. As it is, there's little evidence that it's worth
signing up. But maybe focusing on dedicated users (not casual) will work? As I
said, it's pretty niche.

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kwamenum86
It is a bigger niche than many may realize though.

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markessien
It's not a niche - it's a large market customers in the millions - and
customers who are used to paying for such stuff, and will pay for such stuff.

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kwamenum86
A niche market can have millions of customers.

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felideon
Get an account? You know the drill...

[Insert standard HN remark for sites that require users to sign up before they
can try the app.]

Regardless, pretty cool to have something like this on the web.

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jaytee_clone
Agree.

Why not make it so that if you want to save your composition you need to sign
up?

Application like this, you don't need a video. Just let people use it
immediately.

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paul7986
I really like the idea, but your design when loaded in my browser made me
think this was a blog post and not a web service.

I would suggest centering the site and having a slightly more pronounced logo
at the top; maybe adding more color too - less black. Also the window where
you have sheet music make it larger, while on the side keeping text there.
Though change the text on side of sheet music to be 3 bullet points that say
the what, how and value proposition. Describe it quickly and briefly. Also as
some1 mentioned above get rid of sign up or offer portion of svc no sign up
required.

hth

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unalone
Heh, not my site. I just came across it and thought it was neat.

It says it's from Cambridge, though, so maybe other people know more about it
than I do?

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dan_sim
I really like it. It's basic but it'll do the job for a quick composing gig.
This app comes right on time for me because I have to write a song for a film
and my current soundcard doesn't support MIDI. I wanted nothing fancy, just a
way to have a global idea.

To be able to share the project is awesome. And the revision too. It's like
GoogleDocs for composing music.

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11ren
I take it back - you can publish scores after all:

[http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/2177201ae448ab894682b1...](http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/2177201ae448ab894682b16d557f5544fb678e7b)

But I think you have to leave yourself logged in to do it.

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ken
"We'll copy and paste that into the second half which are almost the same, to
save some time. Now we can use the mouse to adjust some of the notes that are
different in the second half."

I've been transcribing some music recently, and this is one of my big gripes
with "western" musical notation: the control flow is really weak. You can't
encode something as simple as "same as before, but replace the last measure
with __" (much less something like simple macro substitution!). You get
"repeat a section once", "repeat the last measure", and a weak form of GOTO.
Even a simple score is not at all DRY, which I've found makes it harder both
to transcribe and to learn.

Are there any alternative music notation systems that have more powerful
features?

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brent
There are a couple things I would change about the interface (easy insertion),
but I am generally extremely impressed. In my case, I knew the score, wrote
out several measures and realized I missed a note. They don't seem to have any
simple way to reconcile this problem.

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jflowers45
Really enjoyed it, but when I created my first score it took me forever to
figure out how to put in notes (press C for a c, etc)

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kwamenum86
This is actually pretty cool. The interface is a bit confusing but that is
pretty much par for the course for music composition apps/progs unfortunately.

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schtono
It would be great to have the possibility to import scores from other popular
software (cubase etc) so you can collaborate on projects

