
Flat V8 is now live - ciconia
https://blog.flat.io/flat-v8-is-now-live/
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robmcm
What is Flat V8?

This isn't a problem isolated with your website, but it seems to be almost
impossible to get a clear description of a product from any website other than
Wikipedia these days.

Currently I'm assuming it's either a non carbonated vegetable juice, or some
kind of horizontally scaled node implementation.

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Mahn
How to read half the posts that make it to the frontpage on HN:

1\. Click on the link on HN.

2\. Click on the logo/header of the page to go to their main site. If that
fails, remove "blog." from the url.

3\. Read what the thing actually is about.

4\. Go back to the original link and read it (or alternatively just ignore it
and comment about the thing itself on HN).

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davidgerard
Even that doesn't work in this case ...

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gierschv
Thanks for the feedback, we changed the link of the logo + signup links to the
homepage ;-)

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mintone
The product isn't my world, but your logo should link to your product homepage
(www.flat.io) and the word "blog" to the blog front page - it was basically
impossible for me to find out what Flat actually was without modifying the URL
manually :)

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jamiesoncj
This release looks awesome. I remember when Flat first launched and I was
really hoping to be able to use it as a replacement for Sibelius (which is the
only reason I have to keep a Windows VirtualBox on my Ubuntu machine). In the
early days it wasn't quite there yet and was missing some important features
that I needed for arranging scores. I will definitely be giving it another
try, the product has come a long way since then. Kudos to the team!

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rannoup
Thanks! Indeed we put a lot of energy into the V8 release. So excited about it
and can't wait to work on the upcoming bunch of improvements :)

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AnkhMorporkian
Can I make a small recommendation? Your product looks awesome, seriously. But
the V8 through me for a huge loop. I was thinking it was some fork of the the
Chrome V8 engine that used... I'm not sure what, but something flat. V8.0
might be a better name, even if it doesn't fit with the previous releases.

Seriously though, cool product, I'm impressed.

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aeharding
I don't think their target audience will have that problem.

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AnkhMorporkian
Completely fair point.

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Already__Taken
Some minor things; A link to the product in your blog header wouldn't hurt,
and your back-to-school offer link for the pricing page bounces me to a login.
Not sure if that's exactly the flow you intended for showing a promotion.

OH I also didn't realise if I looked at the education page i'd then see
different edu. pricing.

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gierschv
Indeed, our signup link in the header + fixed to the our auth page, we will
change it to our homepage :) Thanks for the feedback for the back to school,
we will check that.

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kerryritter
This is awesome. I've been looking for a Guitar Pro alternative for years, and
this is preeeetty dang close. Copy-pasting measures could be simpler, and
manipulating note length via keyboard would make it precisely what I need -
maybe i just need to figure out how to do that.

Great work, Flat!

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instakill
Why don't you guys look into creating a marketplace for the scores created by
your users? Or make it way more prominent if it exists. I want scores, but I
don't want to make them myself.

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rannoup
Hi, That's a suggestion that comes more and mores. This a way we may go in the
future however that a strong move that requires ressources and a bigger team
:) Moreover there is still so much to do on the editor is self.

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SNvD7vEJ
Feedback: After clicking the link, editing the url to find the real site,
clicking everything, I still don't know what this is besides something that
has to do with music and collaboration.

Suggestion: let a friend (or a professional tester) try out your site and
listen carefully to their comments, before you go boosting, and frustrate a
lot of people that probably will not bother again.

A serious tester would probably have told you that you are missing info on the
site.

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adrianh
Congrats on the new release! As somebody who has built his own web-based music
renderer (soundslice.com), I know how big of a project it is. :-)

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sgt
What web technologies were used to build Flat? I'd be particularly interested
to know how the music editor was built. It looks gorgeous!

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rannoup
We use SVG and Angular.js for the editor and the engraving. WebMidi & WebAudio
APIs for the playback. WebSocket for the realtime collaboration. You can find
our stack on our AngelList page.

~~~
sgt
I have a friend who's a fairly famous pianist. He played Carnegie Hall a
couple of years ago, even. He's always dabbling on his Steinway at home, but
he's not to good with technology. Will Flat V8 be useful for someone like
that? Just thinking of whether I should mention this to him.

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rannoup
We try to make the use of Flat the easiest possible. I think it can give it a
try anyway. Really depends if he is used to music notation softwares :)

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sgt
He's never used any type of music notation software - he's very traditional.
Still, would be interesting if something like this could spark his interest
and he'd change his working methodology over the next years.

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cocoggu
At the end we aim to break the frontier between real world instruments and the
software itself, using real-time transcription through microphone. It will
still take a few months to get there but you got the vision ;)

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Brendinooo
Excited that this exists. I'd love to spend some time playing with it.

However, I was disappointed that the one of the first things I tried to do
(play the "Super Mario Bros. Coin Noise" sheet) worked in Chrome but not
Firefox. Maybe it was just a blip (another sheet worked fine), but I wanted to
call it out anyways!

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cocoggu
Thanks for the report! I couldn't reproduce it though, I guess a network error
happened while downloading the soundfont.

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deanclatworthy
The first and only feedback I can give you is that I can't find a link on your
homepage that actually shows me what your product looks like, or even how it
works. Consider adding an intro video or having a demo that doesn't require me
to log in and give you my personal information.

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freemium413
As others have said, V8 in the title is confusing.. v8.0 would be better.
Also, the website at a glance was very confusing to me. I feel the top should
have a section about what "Flat" is and what it solves. I should know your
mission statement right away.

It looks like a very nice piece of composing software but I fear most of your
visitors will close your website before figuring that out.

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rannoup
you refer to the blog as well?

