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!

I’ll answer that question somewhat indirectly, with an observation followed by another question.

There is a constant trend in the evolution of software. Our expectations of software value received per dollar spent are constantly being raised, whether we are aware of it or not, and online use has a lot to do with it. Part of that process is a shift in perspective that I’ll summarize this way: “Yesterday’s application is tomorrow’s component.”

Let’s look at a familiar example: word processing. Way back when, there was a program called Microsoft Word. Hey, there still is — and it still ain’t cheap! But I’m talking about Word 2000 right now, not MS Office 2008. Its main toolbar looked like this at the time:

And here’s a toolbar from one of those ubiquitous online “rich text editors” that you see in your browser all the time now, everywhere from blogs to email programs to content management systems:

So, back to the original proposition: do you pay anything for an editor like this, that you use in an application whose main purpose is to do something else, that’s larger-scale and more important to you?

Of course you don’t pay for that. You unthinkingly click the “B” button to make your text bold, never giving a thought to the fact that Microsoft used to charge a steep price for functionality like that, back in the day. As you do this, you are not thinking, “wow, I’m doing word processing!” You are using the editor to write your friend an e-mail, or to create some course content for your students, or to make up a document that you are storing online in Adobe Buzzword, Google Docs, etc.

This neatly sums up what Noteflight is all about. What you should pay for isn’t the raw ability to compose and edit music notation on a computer: it’s the software around the editor that matters. Music notation software is going to be free now.

I won’t repeat all of the material on NLE that you can read and watch at the above page, or in our press release. To briefly summarize the picture here: NLE extends the capabilities of the free noteflight.com website, in a way that is aimed at music teachers, music departments and music schools. NLE provides 1) a secure space for each learning community to share and publish its content separate from Noteflight.com, 2) a seamless integration with online course management systems such as Moodle, Blackboard and Haiku, and 3) a really smooth way of handling musical assignments in which students automatically receive private copies of a template created by an instructor and do their work within these copies. The instructor can later access these copies and respond to them individually.

Noteflight Learning Edition’s integration with course management systems (CMSs) is a big deal in a couple of ways. These systems are designed to build and manage web-based content for teaching and learning, and Noteflight is the web-based music notation tool — so putting these ingredients together permits the construction of an online music curriculum that works like a coherent whole, not like a bunch of desktop tools roughly stitched together. Also, these systems manage courses, course rosters, and user authentication in ways that make sense for a variety of settings: higher education, K-12, and non-institutional. NLE works hand-in-hand with each CMS’s way of loggin in users; and it accepts a CMS user automatically as a Noteflight user via a single-sign-on mechanism.

While the noteflight.com site will remain free, NLE requires a modest subscription fee. There are two ways to buy NLE. First, post-secondary institutions can license it yearly, based on their music department or course enrollment figures. Secondly, we will offer a special K-12 package in conjunction with Haiku LMS by Haiku Learning Systems, which combines NLE with Haiku’s elegant course and roster management.

We’re putting the finishing touches on NLE right now, and of course we’re demoing it at this show this week. We expect to have it ready in March; look for another announcement soon!