Noteflight: An Online Music Notation Editor

October 6, 2008 on 5:46 am | In Flex, Music, Programming |

It’s my great pleasure to make an introduction: Noteflight, please say hello to the world. World, there’s something I’d like you to meet: Noteflight. I’m really pleased to be able to finally write this, because it’s been a long journey to get to this point!

Noteflight is a new kind of tool for musicians, composers and educators: an online music notation editor. With Noteflight, anyone can create, share and publish musical scores using nothing more than a web browser. This ease of editing, sharing and publishing are what make Noteflight so different from other notation editors: music notation can finally be used on the Web in as natural and flexible a way as text, images or videos.

Here’s an example of a score that was created in Noteflight, shared, and embedded in this post:

This isn’t just a picture of music, but an interactive music display; for example, you can select and listen to individual notes and measures. Click the logo to see the full-page score, which can be printed. To get a sense of how the score above was created using the Noteflight score editor, please watch this video:

Scores are saved on the Noteflight server, so you and anyone you share them with can access them from anywhere on the Web. The music can be heard as well as seen: Noteflight has its own integrated audio playback, that sounds consistent on every computer. And Noteflight keeps track of all the past versions of your scores, so you can always go back and see where you’ve been.

The Noteflight beta is free and we’re accepting signups. As with all beta software, Noteflight is constantly being improved and extended; this blog is the best place to find out what’s happening (and what’s going to happen next) with Noteflight. Besides filling out the score editing features of Noteflight, we are planning additional services and capabilities for sharing music and organizing content.

There will be more posts coming up here about the development and internals of Noteflight — I’ve had to wait on many of those because the product wasn’t officially launched yet! A few quick techie observations:

  • The Noteflight score editor was built with Adobe Flex 3.0.1 and Flash CS3
  • The Noteflight server side was built with Ruby on Rails 2, Apache and MySQL and is hosted on Amazon EC2 and S3.
  • The Moccasin open-source editing framework (see previous post) is a distillation of many of the music-independent aspects of the Noteflight score editor.
  • The StandingWave audio library, previously discussed here (but not yet open-source), is used by the music synthesizer internal to Noteflight.

18 Comments »

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  1. Wow! This is really cool! As both a Flex developer and a composer/musician this is very exciting!!

    Comment by VeganWizard — October 6, 2008 #

  2. Nice idea, but I can see that your sharing features are almost immediately going to cause problems with the music publishers who own the copyright on most music scores, unless you can find a good way of ensuing your community only uploads original compositions or out-of-copyright works.

    Comment by JulesLt — October 6, 2008 #

  3. Congratulations on the launch; this product looks really outstanding.

    Comment by Erik — October 6, 2008 #

  4. On the IP issues — Noteflight is committed to complying with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. We have no intention of becoming a vehicle for illegal sharing of content, and will respond promptly to complaints of specific copyright violations.

    Comment by joe — October 6, 2008 #

  5. Wow Joe, that looks really awesome! Can’t wait to check it out.

    Comment by Greg Jastrab — October 6, 2008 #

  6. Joe; delighted to see this go public…congratulations on your milestone!

    Comment by Steven Webster — October 6, 2008 #

  7. Hey Joe! Thanks for setting up that account. NoteFlight is badass! A+

    Comment by Chris Lyons — October 8, 2008 #

  8. Congrats Joe! It looks fantastic.

    Comment by Brian Deitte — October 8, 2008 #

  9. that looks fantastic joe! welcome to the world, noteflight.

    Comment by kathryn — October 9, 2008 #

  10. Joe,

    Noteflight is great initiative. Thanks for that.

    I have a technical question : Isn’t it more efficient to provide the samples as mp3 instead of wav, which is about 10 times more data?
    I also remember the guys from Hobnox, using a proprietary OGG Vorbis encoder. Of course that would be more taxing on the client’s cpu.

    Just some thoughts.

    Comment by Willem Van den Broeck — October 16, 2008 #

  11. Yes, it is theoretically more efficient to provide the samples as MP3. However, we’ve been waiting for Flash 10 to be released so that we can use the native MP3 codec built into the Player to decode files, rather than using an AS3-based decoder which is inevitably going to be slow (and consume development cycles too). Now that FP10 is out, we can move ahead on this.

    I said “theoretically” because there is an interesting problem. Many of Noteflight’s samples are kept short by using looping techniques to repeat a trailing segment of the sample to make a longer note. But the MP3 encoding/decoding process introduces a slight loss of accuracy into the sample, meaning that the loops we calculated for WAV samples will no longer work for the same samples after they have been encoded and decoded in the MP3 format which introduces small errors into the waveform. You might think we could just not bother looping the MP3s, but the savings in compression is in some cases outweighed by the increased size of an unlooped sample. To loop an MP3 sample correctly, we’ll need to run it through the Player MP3 codec, write it back out as a WAV filea again and then redetermine the loop points in a DAW. This all takes time!

    Comment by joe — October 16, 2008 #

  12. Thanks for the information. I understand now and maybe WAV isn’t so bad after all.

    If it’s any useful to you, i can say that i’m on a slow connection (2Mb), and loading the wav’s took me only 20 seconds or so. Not a terribly long wait.

    All the best to you people at Noteflight and thanks again.

    Comment by Willem Van den Broeck — October 17, 2008 #

  13. [...] software is the arrival of Noteflight, a Boston-based start-up company under the directorship of Joseph Berkovitz that is developing a simple notation editor in Adobe’s Flex technology, which allows them to [...]

    Pingback by Noteflight in-browser notation software » Sibelius Blog — October 18, 2008 #

  14. First of all, this is absolutely great software.
    Just blew me away :)
    Is it possible to create scores for the piano. I mean, able to create the treble and bass clefs.
    Do you have any online demos ?

    cheers,
    jay

    Comment by jay — January 7, 2009 #

  15. Noteflight is free for individual use — you don’t need an online demo, just sign up for the real thing.

    Comment by joe — January 8, 2009 #

  16. Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for when I started my Google search for some flash based notation software. I can’t wait to play with it some.

    Comment by Joshua Duggan — January 30, 2009 #

  17. [...] But ‘.wav’ files? What’s going on there? Surely nobody would notice if they noteflight used mp3s for thier sound samples, and wouldn’t the download time be a million times better? Well, as it turns out, noteflight.com used wav files because “an ActionScript3-based decoder is inevitably going to be slow (and consume development cycles too)“. [...]

    Pingback by Flex vs. Silverlight: The Elephant in the Room « The Effect Generator — February 21, 2009 #

  18. Awesome - this is exactly what I was looking for! I’m not even a musician, just trying to nut out some harmony parts for an acapella piece I’m performing with some friends. This is PERFECT! Nice work!!

    Comment by Debbie — March 26, 2009 #

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