Recently we removed a feature for playing individual parts that we thought few people used. It worked by checking to see if a single staff was selected, and playing back only that one staff in this case. We thought that this feature was confusing and poorly documented, and it internally conflicted with a new Part Mixer feature that we created for Crescendo. When we created the Part Mixer, it seemed like the best idea to take out the old single-staff feature.

Well, perhaps it wasn’t the best idea… and we’ve thought better of it.

What we’ve found out since the 2.1 release is that that a lot of users really cared about this feature — so we’re bringing it back! It wasn’t our intention to remove something that feels really basic to everyone. We are planning to release a system upgrade in the next week or two that will restore this feature to life. Thanks to everyone who wrote to us and shared their thoughts with us.

As a web-based music notation platform, Noteflight is perfectly positioned to address the needs of music educators on the many campuses that have chosen to place their learning resources online. Most schools employ some form of campus-wide Learning Management System (LMS) software in order to create and maintain these resources for instructors and students. This in turn creates a need for Noteflight Learning Edition (our educational offering) to tie into LMS software in various ways, in particular to avoid the need for students to maintain multiple accounts on different systems.

So far, Noteflight’s approach has been to create custom integrations for different LMSs. Given the number of such systems and the diversity of the LMS market, and our own limitations as a small business, creating integrations for the systems used by all of our customers has been a difficult challenge.

We are now thrilled to say that in Noteflight’s forthcoming 2.1 release we support a new and comprehensive solution to this problem: the BasicLTI integration standard. BasicLTI is a standard for tying together LMS systems and external web-based tools such as Noteflight. It is defined by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, a non-profit collaboration among the world’s leading educational technology vendors, content providers, schools and other organizations. The new standard is now being adopted by many LMSs including Moodle, Sakai, BlackBoard, Desire2Learn, and many others.

Charles Severance is the IMS Affiliate Coordinator and an author of the BasicLTI spec. He has recently blogged about Noteflight’s innovative approach to supporting BasicLTI in this post.

Our approach to BasicLTI makes it extremely simple to integrate Noteflight into any of the above systems: simply add a link to the Noteflight tool, create or navigate to any Noteflight score, and click a button that configures this score as the destination for the link.

Here’s a video showing how it works: