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Staffpad: a new class of notation app

staffpad.net

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Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#23
Holy shit, this is amazing. For those that haven't written music before, previous programs are some of the clunkiest, slowest, most infuriating pieces of crap that I've ever had to deal with. This makes the process literally ten times easier, and so much more fun to use - and the MP3 export? Amazing.

I'm actually considering using Windows because of this and the new hardware. If you had told me that two days ago I and my beautiful Arch setup would have laughed in your face. Kudos to Microsoft/Staffpad, this is really great.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#25
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think math would require more error correction than music. Musical notation is pretty easy to get right, whereas math has a much larger symbol lexicon. Edit: Why the hell was this downmodded?

Not if you restrict the input to LaTeX notation.

Then I wouldn't see an advantage of typing on a screen vs drawing.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#26
Curiosity: For all those ethusing about this, do you have keyboard skills? Piano was my primary instrument and my take on this may be skewed by the fact my primary instrument also turned out to be pretty good for composing music with, when you can literally bash out full chords in real time if the mood strikes you. If your instruments were all single-note instruments that don't hook up to computers worth a darn I could see this being much more exciting.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#27

HN front-end devs: If you were to make a web version of this, would it be better to use canvas or svg? And why?

Either. http://www.vexflow.com/ and http://www.musicxml-viewer.com/ use canvas. http://www.alphatab.net/ and http://abcjs.net/ use svg.

What would be the advantages of using one over the other. I'm in the process of refactoring/improving a web game (connwars.com) I made a while ago and I was planning on using canvas, but I don't know if svg would work better.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#28
post #26

Curiosity: For all those ethusing about this, do you have keyboard skills? Piano was my primary instrument and my take on this may be skewed by the fact my primary instrument also turned out to be pretty good for composing music with, when you can literally bash out full chords in real time if the mood strikes you. If your instruments were all single-note instruments that don't hook up to computers worth a darn I cou…

Composition by writing out rhythms and chords, and writing out multiple parts for multiple instruments, is just a different experience than playing it out on a keyboard. It lets you put more thought into how things line up and are organized, versus how they sound. That sounds downright unmusical but it's a big difference, I think.

This is just from my limited experience as a hobby composer sitting in front of a keyboard with pencil and staff paper, but I've heard it from other composers I know as well.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#29

As far as I'm concerned, this is world-changing technology - a (seemingly?) easy to use, natural-looking, efficient data-entry mechanism that looks like something from the future. That is an absolutely fantastic demo - I was hooked on the background-video within 3 seconds, and found myself wishing the MP3 would play when he was exporting it at the end. Bravo.

Really, I was hooked on the video as soon as he did the pen flourish 4 seconds in. Nailed it.
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