

How the iPad can revolutionize music notation software - dgurney
http://concertwindow.com/3124/how-the-ipad-can-revolutionize-music-notation-software

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baddox
That could be good. I'm fascinated by music notation software, but I've always
found Sibelius and Finale unusable. Lilypond[1] is a pretty good notation
language, but it has no interface. Perhaps the iPad app could generate
LilyPond code.

<http://lilypond.org/web/switch/tour>

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dgurney
good call.. I'll look into that

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mullr
Replace "tap" with "click" in your post. How is the iPad better than doing the
same things with the mouse? I don't dispute that a very nice app could be
created, but I question whether the iPad itself enables any of those things.

Further, a finger is a very imprecise input device. For music, precision is
very important. Even a mouse is not precise enough for lots of things I do
when I use DAW software.

Music notation is one place where I think pen-based input would be useful.
It's precise and the input language is tightly scoped enough that the
recognition problem is solvable. There's also no existing system that lets you
input musical notes in any faster way. Recording-based apps (midi or
otherwise) are always at the mercy of the performer. And unless you're
superhuman (I'm not), you have to spend a long time quantizing and correcting
the transcribed rhythm. It's real bummer. I would much rather scrawl the notes
and know that they'll be nicely typeset out the other end.

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moe
_There's also no existing system that lets you input musical notes in any
faster way._

One word: Keyboard.

This is one thing that I really love about soundtrackers (e.g. renoise[1]).
You just _type_ in your notes while seamlessly tabbing between different
tracks/instruments. This makes experimentation faster and more pleasant than
any other method I've come across.

It is sad that clumsy point-and-click interfaces are still the norm in most
music software. Dragging around little rectangles on a grid is _horrible_.

[1]
[http://www.renoise.com/uploads/images/screenshots/rns25matri...](http://www.renoise.com/uploads/images/screenshots/rns25matrix.jpg)

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spiralganglion
Sibelius is almost there. Almost. They're still expecting you to use a mouse
for some tasks, but you can get a lot done with just the keyboard.

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ugh
I know absolutely nothing about music notation software (and nearly nothing
about making music) but wouldn’t the easiest way of getting notes into any
computer be to connect a midi keyboard and to start playing? I mean, those are
dedicated devices, tailored for just that use. They were created for that
purpose. I guess you might be unable to play a keyboard at speed but you could
still enter the notes without duration with a keyboard (that could be a two
step process — press the note and press some key for the duration afterwards).

It seems absurd to me that you would enter notes with the normal keyboard or
the mouse or by tapping. What am I missing?

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spiralganglion
A whole bunch of things. First, background: I've recorded over 24 albums,
written 5 scores, play over a dozen instruments, and have composed thousands
of pages of music in various notational programs using a ton of different
input methods. Ok, let's go.

A midi keyboard takes up space. It also takes up more space the better it
gets. If you want a 3 or 5 or 7 octave keyboard, you need to have that sort of
room in your work area. Imagine an entire piano keyboard on your desk. Even a
smaller keyboard takes up more space than another regular computer keyboard,
and having a second one of those is difficult enough to work with.

Space issues aside, there's the issue of workflows. I've yet to find a music
notation program with an anything approaching an elegant flow. For each
passage of music that you'd like to write, there are a ton of variables that
need to be expressed and recorded, and the midi keyboard only handles a few of
these. You need to capture pitches of multiple notes (chords), durations,
accents, articulations, voicing (for multiple parts on the same staff, as in
choral music), dynamics, and many other things. Many of these are optional,
and only used when needed, but even the most fundamental ones are often a
chore to enter. A midi keyboard is great for entering note pitches, but as you
described, playing in time (at speed) seems to be the only way to avoid
entering all the note-lengths by hand. Playing in time has its own problems,
too. You have to match the data to a grid structure. But the grid structure
needs to be strict enough to catch the subtleties of the performance, and
flexible enough to compensate for human-error. Otherwise, you'll be back to
manual data-entry to correct all the parsing mistakes. These constraints also
depend largely on the person playing the keyboard. On the other hand, an
alternating two-step process isn't any faster with a midi keyboard than a
computer keyboard.

Midi keyboards were not created for data entry. They were created for live
performance, controlling other dedicated devices that created music, like
synthesizers. They've been co-opted to enter data for notation, and while they
can accelerate the process somewhat, there are shortcomings on the software
side. It is also largely dependent on the type of music being transcribed.

I am very much in favour of an iPad notation program. I've been thinking about
that since last summer, but I haven't had time to make one myself. If someone
tackles this problem and comes up with an elegant solution, they'll have no
noteworthy competition on either side of the PC/Post-PC divide. Pun intended.

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georgieporgie
I suspect the reason that so few -- and such poor -- options exist is that the
market is too small.

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oblique63
The market is there, it's just that no one really pays attention to it. The
options currently out there are all pricey (for the 'starving artist' types
that musicians tend to be anyway), bloated (the latest Guitar Pro has Effects
Pedals for crying out loud), and just expect musicians to instinctively know
what to do when given nearly half a screenful of buttons. Just the other day I
noticed a Sibelius manual at my local bookstore that was the size of a phone
book! If you're a songwriter, all you want to do is basically get to the point
where you could record a demo of your stuff; the last thing you're gonna want
to do, is waste your time going through a huge tome just to write your stuff
down.

I'm actually working on a startup that's looking to solve this problem, and
we're fully confident that good, affordable, and simple yet well-thought-out
music notation software is something that musicians everywhere are going to
have a huge sigh of relief over. We're even applying to the summer YC session
in hopes of accomplishing this faster :)

oh, and our url is <http://www.tabrat.com> by the way (still only a splash
page though).

