What's the latest at Noteflight?
In this month's issue:
Introducing Noteflight 2.1 We released Noteflight 2.1 a couple of weeks ago. Now usually a release ending in ".1" is not the most impressive event, but this one contains a ton of features that weren't quite ready to go out the door when we released Crescendo back in March. As a result, it's fairly packed with features. In fact, we've finally had to redesign the palette to let us organize the new stuff without making it unwieldy or complicated. Both the free edition and Crescendo have just become much more powerful. Crescendo has picked up a slew of new capabilities including viewing and printing of individual parts, audio mixing, coloring/hiding of notes and bends/releases/slides on guitar. And the free version includes tempo changes, 8va/8vb, piano pedals, trills, stemless notes, cue passages and more. You can read all about this stuff in our release notes, naturally! | |
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In Profile: Chris Chater Though classically trained, Chris found Jazz and Blues at an early age and leaped at the chance to teach music at the American School of Paris where he has been teaching for the last 42 years. Technology has always been Chris’ second love since his first reel-to-reel tape recorder, and he believes that 21st century learning lets students claim ownership of their learning just as any doctorate student would. As Chris puts it, “tools like Noteflight give 'wings' where before we only had paper and pencil.” |
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Chris is married with two grown children and has not tired of the traditional French lifestyle - two hours of shopping at the open market every Saturday and nearly as much to prepare and enjoy the delicious fresh produce!
Earliest musical memory: My mother singing “Blow the Wind Southerly” at my bedside. Instrument of choice: Alto Recorder I am inspired by:All of my students in Grades 2-5 – that’s why I’m a teacher! Favorite Composer: Bach Favorite Performers:Frans Bruggen How I use Noteflight:I post rehearsal pieces for my students, original compositions by students, midi files for study resource. Listen to my Noteflight score: Rather than share MY Noteflight score, I would like to share the last year’s archive of student compositions largely featuring Noteflight scores. These transcriptions involved real-time recording using Logic Fun (the Windows ancestor of Garage Band), then exporting via MIDI files to Harmony Assistant, then exporting to Noteflight via MusicXML 2.0. Learning Edition Integration Just Got Easier. Many Noteflight customers in K-12 education and university instruction are faced with the challenge of integrating Noteflight with learning management systems that help manage and optimize teacher/student work flow of assignments, feedback and grading. Although not impossible, integration takes time and resources that some schools don’t always have. There’s good news on this front, the IMS Global Consortium, a standards body for educational technology, has recently released a new standard called "Basic LTI" (Basic Learning Tools Interoperability) that addresses exactly the kind of single-signon integration that we have been discussing with many of our customers. In fact, the architecture of the Basic LTI standard is very similar to our existing integration API. Many LMS vendors such as Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, Sakai and others are now embracing this standard. We’ve shot a quickie demo video that how an LTI integration with Moodle works. Watch the video on YouTube. Noteflight and WordPress. Who doesn't love WordPress? For those of you who aren't sure if you love it or not, WordPress is open source software that allows you to host your own "blog" website, allowing other users to register on your site and write articles or "posts", plus comment on other users' posts. It's become one of the most popular web applications in the world, and its power goes far beyond blogging: it provides a very flexible way to create sites in which users are free to create and share content with each other. "Content" can mean text, images, videos... and thanks to Noteflight, it can mean musical scores as well. The Noteflight Blog is an example of a WordPress site. If you're hosting your own WordPress site, Noteflight integrates with WordPress in a couple of exciting ways. First, we now support single-signon between WordPress and Noteflight Learning Edition. This means you can set up a Learning Edition community with Noteflight, and let every user on your WordPress site seamlessly access a matching account on Learning Edition without ever needing to sign in separately. All your WordPress users will also be able to see scores shared within that community. Second, Noteflight supports a nifty standard called OEmbed, that allows you to simply paste a Noteflight score link into WordPress and have the embedded score appear as if by magic. (You have to configure your WordPress site to tell it that this is OK.) Talk to us (as well as behind our back!) Please tell us about how you're using Noteflight to collaborate and share music with others, so we can let everyone know about your ideas and experiences in future newsletters. Send us an email at: info@noteflight.com. Nowadays, you can communicate with us via Facebook and Twitter too. |
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