More and more these days, we’ve been asked about the availability of a Noteflight app for mobile devices. Our users write, “How about an iPad app?” “How about Android?” Sometimes the question takes a more impatient form than that, which we can totally understand. The computing world is tilting and shifting, and music notation has not yet received the treatment it deserves on mobile. Many people feel, as we do, that Noteflight on mobile is a natural born killer app.

Another question we hear is, “Isn’t Flash dead?” Or, put another way, “When is Noteflight moving to HTML5? Isn’t everyone doing that now?”

These two issues are very strongly related, and at Noteflight we think about them together. With today’s release of Noteflight’s mobile score viewer, it feels like a very timely moment to talk about what we’re doing, and why we’re following the particular path that we’re taking.
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Big news for Noteflight Crescendo and other premium users! You can now view and play Noteflight scores on most mobile devices and platforms, including iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle Fire. We’ve made it easy to view and play your scores anywhere – just login to Noteflight.com on your mobile device and tap any score. There’s no app to install or purchase – the mobile viewer is a feature of our website. It automatically comes up when you view a Noteflight score on a mobile device.

You can display a score in either of two ways – as multiple pages sized to exactly fit your mobile device screen, or as a single scrolling page.

When you play a score in multi-page view, we automatically turn the pages for you, which is great for following along with, or performing, the score.

You can display single parts of a score by selecting an individual part from the part chooser.

Note that there can be a delay of several minutes the first time a score is accessed from a mobile device. Our servers need to do a bunch of work to “mobilize” each score – the amount of time it takes depends on how busy our servers are, and how long the score is. Once a version of a score has been “mobilized”, viewing it should take just a few seconds.

When you view a score, we reduce the Noteflight header to a thin black bar to give you the most room to view your score on smaller devices – tap on your browser’s back button to return to the score listings, or you can display the full sized Noteflight header by tapping on the arrow in the upper right corner of the screen.

If you’re using a mobile device that supports Adobe Flash (many Android devices do), you can still access the full Noteflight editor by tapping on the “Open in Noteflight Score Editor” link above the score.

Stay tuned for more developments on the iPad and mobile devices – this is just our first step towards making Noteflight accessible everywhere, for all of our users (free users too)!

Some fine print on our first release (expect improvements in the future):

• Scores with synchronized audio or video media will play the built-in Notelight sounds, and video will not be shown.
• Document layout settings like note size and system spacing are ignored.
• Page mode doesn’t automatically scroll to keep the cursor in view.

(Want to know more about Noteflight’s mobile strategy? Read Joe Berkovitz’s blog post on Mobile, HTML5, Flash and Noteflight.)

Leader in Christian worship music chooses Noteflight’s web-based notation viewer to revamp offering and enhance user experience

April 23, 2012 Cambridge, MA –
Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) announced the re-launch of its SongSelect service showcasing the unique capabilities of Noteflight’s MusicXML sheet music viewer technology. As part of this major re-launch, CCLI has deployed a custom version of Noteflight’s MusicXML sheet music viewer, that supports SongSelect’s various score formats and features while adding new functionality that leverages Noteflight’s specific technological advantages.

Noteflight’s viewer is ideal for use within the SongSelect service due to Noteflight’s full-featured score layout and playback capabilities. This flexibility allows CCLI customers to exercise more control over layout, transposition, note size, inclusion of parts and many other options.

CCLI serves a large, diverse population of churches by providing SongSelect, a subscription-based licensing service that includes access to musical scores in a variety of formats including lead, chord and vocal sheets. As the most comprehensive legal source for worship music, the selection of the viewer technology was a critical consideration for CCLI.
“Over 60,000 churches across North America already have a SongSelect subscription. But we’re always looking to better serve our customers and provide them with the best possible experience. With web technology pushing forward so quickly, we want SongSelect to remain relevant as a worship team resource and Noteflight is an integral part of this vision.” remarked George Ross, CTO of CCLI.

“CCLI is unique in its global reach and in its use of a subscription model, which allows its customers great flexibility in tailoring their sheet music to their needs,” said Joe Berkovitz, President of Noteflight. “We’re extremely pleased to be able to serve an organization of this scale with our platform.”
Noteflight offers cloud-based music notation software to individuals, K-12 music teachers, university level music educators and has licensed its viewer technology to leading global music companies, including sheet music publishers and digital content distributors.
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