It’s been a long, cool, rainy summer in Boston…. but the good weather has finally arrived at the very end of the season, and along with the bright sunlight comes a new Noteflight release.

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.

We decided a little while ago that we wanted to do something for the Flash development community, to move the whole agenda of Flash-based audio applications forward.  When it came down to it, we felt the best way to do this was to share our basic audio engine with the world.  It’s not our core intellectual property — which includes musical and notational algorithms — but it is an enabling technology for anyone who wants to build Flash apps that really leverage the power of the new audio capabilities that Adobe is providing.

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!

We’re pleased as punch to share some good news: Noteflight just received the “Technical Excellence in Flash” award at the FITC 2009, which I’m attending and speaking at.  It’s nice to have all of our team’s hard work recognized by others in the industry (some of whom have also worked on notated music).