Comments on: Noteflight: An Online Music Notation Editor

By: Debbie

Debbie — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:41:43 +0000

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!!

By: Flex vs. Silverlight: The Elephant in the Room « The Effect Generator

Flex vs. Silverlight: The Elephant in the Room « The Effect Generator — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:28:27 +0000

[...] 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)“. [...]

By: Joshua Duggan

Joshua Duggan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:49:12 +0000

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.

By: joe

joe — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:47:57 +0000

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

By: jay

jay — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:26:09 +0000

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

By: Noteflight in-browser notation software » Sibelius Blog

Noteflight in-browser notation software » Sibelius Blog — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 10:36:49 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Willem Van den Broeck

Willem Van den Broeck — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:21:58 +0000

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.

By: joe

joe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:56:31 +0000

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!

By: Willem Van den Broeck

Willem Van den Broeck — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:33:28 +0000

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.

By: kathryn

kathryn — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:11:55 +0000

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