We decided a little while ago that we wanted to do something for the Flash development community, to move the whole agenda of Flash-based audio applications forward.  When it came down to it, we felt the best way to do this was to share our basic audio engine with the world.  It’s not our core intellectual property — which includes musical and notational algorithms — but it is an enabling technology for anyone who wants to build Flash apps that really leverage the power of the new audio capabilities that Adobe is providing.

The library is called StandingWave and it’s available under the MIT OS license so you can freely include it in any projects, commercial or otherwise.  We’re excited about sharing this, and hope to see more and more folks doing ambitious things with audio in the browser!

We’re pleased as punch to share some good news: Noteflight just received the “Technical Excellence in Flash” award at the FITC 2009, which I’m attending and speaking at.  It’s nice to have all of our team’s hard work recognized by others in the industry (some of whom have also worked on notated music).

One of the cool things you can do with Noteflight that is really awkward to achieve with almost any other notation software is a truly collaborative work with multiple authors. Because scores can be shared and optionally made editable by any registered user, the field is open for people to create truly multi-author works.

As great examples of this kind of thing, you should check out:

• ADD TO THIS SONG which was started by Lexus Williams.  It’s kind of a swing jam that features a few different solos and breaks.
• Everyone Add 4 Bars started by HailCorduroy.

Noteflight.com still doesn’t have forums, groups, or other such staples of social networking sites which makes it a little hard to kick off a collaborative score like this and attract attention from other users.  probably a good way to do that right now is to use your own blogs and sites to start a piece going in your own circle of friends.  We’re thinking about how we might introduce more opportunities for these kinds of things while keeping the good things about Noteflight going.  In the meantime we’re really glad that some of our users are taking the initiative!