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.

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:

The new notations can be stretched, angled and shaped in flexible ways to fit their context in the score; each of the little “handles” on the slur in the above illustration can be dragged with the mouse to change the slur’s shape. Slurs and hairpins can also extend across a system break and will be shown correctly on all the systems in which they appear.

Please see our release notes for more details!

Also, our intention was to highlight multiple pages of favorites, both recent ones, and long-term ones. However, the navigation between these pages was obscure and lots of people missed the small drop-down list that provided the choice.

As a result, we’ve made a change. We have introduced two new tabs under “Browse”: recent favorites, and all-time favorites. The recent favorites listing will be more aggressive in focusing on scores that have indeed been favorited recently, and the score’s presence in the list will depend on the timing of other users choosing it as a favorite, not on whether the score itself changes or not. We’ll probably continue to tweak our approach moving forward!

This only changes the screen magnification, and only for newly created scores.  All scores will print exactly the way they used to, and you can always use the Zoom control to work with scores at a smaller size if you prefer.

What’s in this one?  Let’s hit the highlights:

• MIDI File Import. At long last, you can import standard MIDI files from your computer directly into Noteflight.  MIDI import means that Noteflight has to do a lot of extra work to turn a musical performance back into notation, such as guessing the intended rhythms and figuring out what instruments to use.  These challenges are tricky and we expect to continue improviing this feature over time, but we think it’s best to put our best foot forward and get something out to our users sooner rather than later!
• Figured Bass and Enhanced Chord Symbols. Many people have wanted to use traditional figured bass notation in Noteflight, and now it’s possible.  We’ve extended our easy-to-use chord symbol feature to let you enter figured bass notation in the same simple way (”6/5/b3″, for example, does exactly what you would expect).  The same approach also now allows you to use “stacked scale degree” notation for jazz chords (”C6/9″).  We’ve also switched to a clearer sans-serif font.
• Noteflight Newsletter. We’ve introduced a new, monthly email newsletter for our members.  Along with the newsletter has come the responsibility of keeping track of who wants to hear from us, and who doesn’t.  You can control this setting by going to your “Edit My Profile” page.

If you’re feeling like there should have been more — well, we always feel the same way!  There are a lot of things to do, and we never feel like we’ve quite done enough.  There are a number of key features that we’re working on that are not ready for release yet, but which are actively being developed.  The most important of these are:

• Playback of repeats, endings, codas, D.S./D.C. instructions
• Slurs
• Score comments, plus other kinds of social connections between people and music

And as always, don’t forget to vote for (or add) your favorite feature requests at our feedback site.

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!

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!