Staffpad is incredible but it's not brand new or developed by Microsoft. Hanselminutes (Scott Hanselman) did an excellent interview with the engineer who created it a few months back, definitely worth listening to if this piqued your interest. Thoroughly covers how it was conceived and coded in C#/C++, with comments about the relationship to Microsoft: http://www.hanselminutes.com/473/developing-staffpad-a-new-c...
Staffpad: a new class of notation app
61–70 of 104 posts
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#62[deleted]
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#63This looks great!
...but will it do Guitar Tab?
Thousands of passionate staff-illiterate-to-barely-competent songwriting guitarists would probably like to know.
Edit: Went ahead and emailed through their contact form, I'm eager to find out what they say.
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#64Curiosity: 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…
Yes, I do but I'm stubborn in my current production process within Ableton Live Suite, but I have my reasons. As in I record single takes as audio files, not record MIDI inputs that would drive a synth engine. Well, I do that for drums but I finger drum naturally then build the drum line from clips/loops of my own usually with minimal corrections or quantizing.
Honestly I'd love to use this thing for Guitar Tab when sitting down and figuring out songs / covers. I still use pen and paper for that. Again, Ableton Live Suite has powerful tools to help - converting music to MIDI, both rhythms or melodies - but I do my own thing.
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a very cool piece of tech to be sure, but as a composer who has used notation programs almost daily for over a decade, this really doesn't solve any new problems, and it isn't anywhere near powerful enough for professionals (yet), so most will be importing files from StaffPad into Finale/Sibelius/etc. With a MIDI keyboard and some keyboard shortcuts I can enter music extremely quickly. To write a string of 8 16…
To write a string of 8 16th notes, for example ... You haven't actually tried out the app have you? To do 8 16th notes, you just need to draw 8 small slanted lines.
If you want to explicitly enter 16th notes, you have to make it obvious to StaffPad that that's what you want, otherwise it can interpret the lines as 8th or 32nd notes, or a combination of those depending on where the notes fall in the measure. Again, for simple scores where the handwritten music is fairly obvious, it works fine. The key point is that the entry method slows down professional users, because you have to make sure you're doing things that the program can understand, which means taking time to place your marks methodically and reviewing every entry you make to make sure the program was correct to your intentions.
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
To write a string of 8 16th notes, for example ... You haven't actually tried out the app have you? To do 8 16th notes, you just need to draw 8 small slanted lines.
If you want to explicitly enter 16th notes, you have to make it obvious to StaffPad that that's what you want, otherwise it can interpret the lines as 8th or 32nd notes, or a combination of those depending on where the notes fall in the measure. Again, for simple scores where the handwritten music is fairly obvious, it works fine. The key point is that the entry method slows down professional users, because you have…
OK, but ... have you tried it out? You seem to be assuming quite a lot about how well it can interpret input.
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#67Relevant capability testing joke:
Aphex Twin should give it a whirl!
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#68FWIW, Brown University was doing research in this *Pad field (stylus-based input apps for domain specific notations) in the late 90s/2000s. I was a member of this group for a brief period of time. It's really exciting to see a resurgence in high quality pen computing with affordable, entry-level consumer hardware like the Surface 3.
Music Notepad (original): http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/music/home.html
Music Notepad (tabletpc): http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/music/tpc.html
Mathpad: (Commercialized) http://www.fluiditysoftware.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAFGONn4KoQ
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#69Relevant capability testing joke: Aphex Twin should give it a whirl! http://i.imgur.com/OOspNNV.jpg
Those amused by such straining of music notation may like this site: http://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/
Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app
#70Now that Apple Pencil exists, I hope they consider a port. This looks amazing but I just don't think any app could convince me to buy a Windows machine.