Features Coming Soon

First, let’s talk about something that’s coming soon, which I know is of interest to lots of our users.  It’s a new design for the My Scores page of Noteflight, including several features that are going to make a big difference for all of us.

Here are few problems with Noteflight that we’re very aware of:

• It’s hard to keep track of lots of scores, when all Noteflight gives you is a big long list of your stuff. This problem affects our premium users especially.
• If you belong to multiple Noteflight sites (like noteflight.com and, say, a site for your classroom or your university course) there’s no easy way for you to copy scores between those sites.
• Deleting more than one score is impossible. If you want to get rid of a lot of stuff, you’ll be at it for a long time.

We’re solving the first problem with a new feature we call collections. They’re a little bit like folders, in that they have names and they can hold some of your scores, allowing you to work with separate, smaller lists.  Collections aren’t exactly like folders, though!  They’re better in an important way: a score can belong to more than one collection.

All these new features are addressed by a brand-new look to the My Scores page that allows you to select multiple scores at once and do stuff to ‘em — put them in a collection, copy to another site, or delete them.  You can drag and drop single or multiple scores whereever you want them to go: a collection, another site, or the Trash. Here’s a screen shot of the current design (the visuals aren’t done yet, so our designer scribbled the icons by hand!).  We might still change our minds about some of these things, so we’re not promising the final version will be like this…

Features Coming Not As Soon

Now, on to the future. Recently I attended Boston Music Hack Day 2011, which is an awesome event where developers from all over the world congregate to build new, experimental music software on the spot. (There are actually several Music Hack Day events on different dates in different countries, but most of them attract an international crowd).  About 56 new projects or “hacks” were created that day; check out the link above for more information. It’s a weekend event, so a lot of people stayed up all Saturday night to work on their hack in time for the Sunday demos. There was a lot of partying and music-software-hacker mayhem of a pleasing kind.

I was fortunate enough to be there, and I worked on a couple of projects with Vladimir Viro,  the founder of another music software company called Peachnote.  PeachNote specializes in analyzing and searching music databases, which is something that’s really interesting to us at Noteflight.

One of our projects was aimed at taking something that Peachnote already does — searching for a piece of music that is similar to a melody or phrase that you type — and applying it to Noteflight. It’s pretty cool: you use an embedded mini-version of Noteflight to enter the music you’re searching for, and Peachnote finds Noteflight scores (shared ones, of course) that are similar!  Here’s a video demo of that process:

Our other project, which people seemed to think was even cooler, was to use the Peachnote database to automatically complete melodies in Noteflight. You type the beginning of a melody in Noteflight, and Peachnote figures out other melodies that begin the same way. Then it pulls in the rest of those melodies, and you can switch rapidly between them. This might seem like a really weird, un-original thing to do if you are writing a melody. It certainly isn’t the way I usually compose, and initially I was skeptical that it would be either fun or useful. I think I was wrong on both counts. What I found out is that the automatic completion process gives you ideas (all of which other people already had), which you can then adapt and make into your own — or not!

Another interesting idea in this hack was the ability to vary the autocompletion results based on different collections of music from different styles or historical periods. We made it so you can complete your melody based on music from several different centuries, with very different results.

Here’s a video of this hack — is this feature good, bad or both? You decide!

If Noteflight ever includes this feature, it will no doubt be changed quite a bit in the process. This is only a taste of things that are yet to come.