Noteflight: start-up that lets you compose music within your browser

http://www.noteflight.com/info/learn_more

by unalone • 18 years ago

41 18 18 years ago

dan_sim• 18 years ago

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.

felideon• 18 years ago

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.

unalone2• 18 years ago

Gah, that line always bugs me. Some things work well without sign-ups, some things wouldn't work as well with them.

I dunno about this one, but I'd understand any designer who wants people to get accounts. There's some rationale there.

jaytee_clone• 18 years ago

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.

noonespecial• 18 years ago

Runs in your browser: no installation

But you have to sign up before you can even really see what it does. That's worse than a small install.

paul7986• 18 years ago

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

unalone2• 18 years ago

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?

jflowers45• 18 years ago

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)

brent• 18 years ago

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.

11ren2• 18 years ago

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.

kwamenum863• 18 years ago

It is a bigger niche than many may realize though.

markessien• 18 years ago

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.

martin• 18 years ago

Totally agree on the ease of use thing. I used to do some MIDI composition with an old version of Cakewalk Home Studio years ago. It was light on notational features (that's not really what it was intended for) but I've never come upon another app that I found to be as straightforward to sit down with and just bang out some musical ideas. This web app could easily become a perfect solution for that sort of informal usage. But the UI needs to be stupid easy, and currently it's not. It seems like you should be able to import a MIDI to get started, too.

I think score sharing done right (i.e. better than this) would be pretty awesome, too. Open it up to non-members and add search, tagging, ratings, commenting, etc., and you'd have the YouTube of musical compositions and arrangements. There's a BIG community of musicians out there for whom that could prove very valuable.

kwamenum863• 18 years ago

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.

11ren2• 18 years ago

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

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/2177201ae448ab894682b1...

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

schtono• 18 years ago

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

ken• 18 years ago

"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?

Noteflight: start-up that lets you compose music within your browser

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