It’s been an exciting couple of weeks at Noteflight, as we’ve watched the number of registered users climb from less than 100 before our launch to nearly 2,000 today. But an even bigger deal for us is the increasing number of original scores being shared by people on the site. This kind of sharing is one of the main reasons we built Noteflight, and it’s so gratifying to see it happening.

We’re aware that Noteflight could offer much more support for the kind of online musical community that we want to grow. It’s easy to share music on Noteflight, but there are still few features for people to share their thoughts and opinions about that music, or to find each other and find each other’s works in useful ways. The fact that so much music is being shared now is motivating us to think very hard about what to do next.

Our design team met today to plan for the next couple of releases. We think we’ve got some good ideas that can help this community organize and build itself, and make it easier to find and follow music and people that interest us. We’ll say more about those ideas here when we’re more definite! There will also, of course, be many assorted improvements, bug fixes, and new music notation features. If you have specific ideas about things you’d like to see on the service, we hope you’ll get in touch with us or post a comment here.

There are many interesting scores out there on Noteflight; let me close by embedding a couple of scores from the many that I heard today that connected with me in some way:

KanonKaeru, posted by minimitkj

Also, here’s Fervidus by Bridget Whelan of London:

The beta of Flash Player 10 has been out there for a while, and we’ve done more than just kick the tires.  Flash Player 10 brings some really important improvements to Noteflight in the audio area (and we lobbied Adobe pretty hard for those changes, along with our friends in the Adobe Make Some Noise campaign).

The new Noteflight Beta 2.1 supports these improvements by automatically detecting Flash Player 10 and using the new features and APIs if it finds them present.  The most immediate improvement for Noteflight users is a steadier playback, especially on Windows computers, with no rhythmic hiccups.  The short delay before beginning playback is also gone: the music starts much faster.

Flash Player 10 will enable some other important improvements that will follow soon:

• Some instrument sounds will use MP3 compression, for higher quality and faster startup
• Forthcoming MIDI and MusicXML import/export features will not require a server round trip

Altogether we’re really excited about what Adobe has done in Flash 10, and it’s going to make a big difference for our service!

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.

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 — Scaramella va a la Guerra by the 15th century composer Josquin Des Prez:

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. 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. Stay tuned!