Staffpad: a new class of notation app
staffpad.net
staffpad.net
I'm actually considering using Windows because of this and the new hardware. If you had told me that two days ago I and my beautiful Arch setup would have laughed in your face. Kudos to Microsoft/Staffpad, this is really great.
With a MIDI keyboard and some keyboard shortcuts I can enter music extremely quickly. To write a string of 8 16th notes, for example, I can press 1 button to select the note length, then press the 8 notes on the keyboard to write the notes (this is with any modern notation program). With this app, I have to draw each individual notehead, beam across the top, and then an additional beam for the 16th notes, then I have to hope I got everything in the right place so that it correctly recognizes my intentions. On that last point, anything beyond very simple scores would probably end up being a nightmare in terms of productivity. A video from last April shows a person making a very common action - beaming more than 2 eighth notes together in a 4/4 measure, but the program thinks he wants triplets, so he has to go back and erase the marking. I can only imagine how many of these "hitches" would pop up in a more complex score.
The price is fairly low, and they seem to promising more features and refinement, so it will be interesting to see where it goes. But the input method, while neat to look at, is fundamentally a regression for professionals. A Vim-style system that allows for extremely rapid entry of music would be an interesting and useful approach, but something that might not have a wide appeal. This app will be useful for those that want to jot down ideas while not at their desktop, and many people will buy it for the novelty, but I would imagine most professionals will wait.
You haven't actually tried out the app have you? To do 8 16th notes, you just need to draw 8 small slanted lines.
One of the reasons that I often wind up using Lilypond instead of MuseScore is when I'm writing examples like a sheet of scales. I can write a little script that emits the Lilypond notation, and then render it with Lilypond.
1. The keypad / MIDI keyboard input method is definitely efficient once you're good at it, but I would say it's much harder to get used to than just drawing the notation. Drawing a dotted quarter note is natural for anyone who has taken music theory. Pressing 4 (or whatever) for quarter note, then '.' for dot, then pressing a key on a different keyboard for the pitch -- it's just a pretty intricate set of steps to go through for something that would just be a few intuitive strokes of a pen.
2. A MIDI keyboard takes up noticeable space. Even though I do a fair amount of Sibelius, I don't have one in my music room -- I only have a real piano. You also need to make sure your setup has the MIDI keyboard right next to your computer, which isn't super convenient.
It's true, I'm not a professional in the sense that you mean. But I am a serious musician doing real work (some local groups perform my work, and I work on editions of old music too). If it's well executed, I'd much prefer working this way to the existing options.
i would imagine one keystroke per note. maybe one modifier for things like several octaves out.
Beyond that there's also just the difficulty of mapping between the keyboard and keys, how do you easily deal with the gaps in the black keys, there's enough keys to map one to one with most of a piano but keeping that in memory while notating music is a big ask.
I can't really address that very well because it's beyond my experience, but I'll summarize what I've seen. The main gripes seem to be it's still a little slow to enter notes because you have to specify the note length each time you want to change it and that it takes up a lot of space compared to something like this where you can just write it out when it may or may not be your instrument.
My favorite engraving software is LilyPond, which is similar to LaTeX in that it's just a plain text language that gets rendered. There is no GUI, although there are several "IDEs" that I have tried (they seem to be mostly useless beyond syntax highlighting, templates, and a live preview). And like LaTeX, it is often extremely frustrating, and the learning curve is extremely steep. But I think I prefer it because, once you get some experience using it, it is (mostly) very predictable and gives very fine-grained control.
Well, first of all - this is not the app to write music. It's the app to write music score. Although they brag about playback with something akin to a sample-based orchestra, there's not even a hint on traditional DAW capabilities, so you'll have to export the result midi into your DAW of choice and then get into the the whole music-writing process other than arranging anyway.
And on other hand, have you tried the latest Logic? It seems pretty great when it comes to the score interface. Unlike this app, it's also one of the best DAWs out there, and has an enormous default sound library.
Key to the way StaffPad works is its method of recognizing your scribbles. It looks at every individual stroke you make and then interprets what you wrote based on the relationship of each stroke to all of the others. David says that “it’s more efficient and accurate to take the position and temporal information from the pen, and then use musical context to decide what the music is trying to be. That way, you can do things that would totally confuse OCR. Because we know the order of the strokes and where they are in relation to the notes, we can say, OK, that’s a natural, that’s a sharp.”
http://www.sibeliusblog.com/news/staffpad-is-a-music-handwri...
Seeing him on stage with Nadella was a particular highlight.
That is an absolutely fantastic demo - I was hooked on the background-video within 3 seconds, and found myself wishing the MP3 would play when he was exporting it at the end.
Bravo.
With my project, I'm hoping to bring some of that flexibility back into the compositional process. In short, it's an infinite canvas with time on the x-axis and pitch on the y-axis that you can simply paint with your fingers. You're not constrained by key signature, time signature, or note length, though there are snapping tools to help with that if you need it. It's meant more as a tool to take musical "notes" than as something that can produce a clean final product. As someone who doesn't play the guitar very well (yet), I'm looking forward to using it to experiment with guitar solos.
Here's an early demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw
I hope to release it in the next few months, though we all know how that goes! iPad Pencil support is definitely something I want to do as well.
Just going to spit-ball a couple thoughts based on my experiences and your write-up!
I've been using Blend.io to share my Ableton Live projects with others online (via Dropbox). This is helpful because settings are exported - do you think that in time you might have a mechanism in the program to list & chart out the settings for a synth, say like Massive? Could be a whole can of worms, but important stuff to recall going forward when taking notes.
As for guitar solos, I think you could use one of the blues Kings for material in testing, either B.B. King or Freddie King, depending on how much pitch bending or note rapidity you'd be interested in. If you want to get extreme, Dimebag Darrell of Pantera had some crazy harmonic & Floyd Rose "dive-bomb" tricks he'd use that might test capability!
The initial offering will be pretty sandboxed from the rest of the production toolchain; I'm aiming for an MVP with the simple goal of "sketch music quickly". So there won't be much to offer in terms of interacting with other software.
After that, however, anything is up for grabs. Eventually, I'd love to add features that would make it an invaluable music production tool, not just a note-taking app. Under the hood, each instrumental layer in my app has a set of "traits" (volume, vibrato, expression, etc.) that get matched to the appropriate settings in the output instrument if they exist. Only the settings that exist in the output instrument are used; the rest are ignored. For the time being, these traits are only used internally for the built-in MIDI synth. But if I'm understanding you correctly, this means that it should be pretty simple to add arbitrary traits for outside instruments. And eventually, when I add Audiobus and/or MIDI-out support, it should be possible to play the track directly through the synth! (But that's a bit into the future... need to focus! Need to focus!)
Thanks for the guitar solo tips, I will definitely be using some of those!
I can understand that music is a good first application of this technology, but entering mathematical and engineering-related content through such an interface could be a huge deal as well.
Anyone used the Khan Academy app to brush up on some math? They've got a very nice handwriting to text feature to allow easy entry of answers on a mobile device, a pen would work great in combination.
Edit: Why the hell was this downmodded?
Math, on the other hand, is actually way easier even including things like mapping diagrams.
http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Math-I...
Music Notepad (original): http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/music/home.html
Music Notepad (tabletpc): http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/music/tpc.html
Mathpad: (Commercialized) http://www.fluiditysoftware.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAFGONn4KoQ
This is just from my limited experience as a hobby composer sitting in front of a keyboard with pencil and staff paper, but I've heard it from other composers I know as well.
For that matter I instantly noticed a difference going from ScreamTracker to a MIDI synth, too. Didn't even have an acclimation period, it was immediately of a different nature.
Many composers that use a piano will also write out the notation by hand without a MIDI interface. In the scene[1] from Amadeus, replace Salieri's quill and paper with a stylus and the iPad/Surface.
I can see Staffpad software being useful for both types of composers.
Honestly I'd love to use this thing for Guitar Tab when sitting down and figuring out songs / covers. I still use pen and paper for that. Again, Ableton Live Suite has powerful tools to help - converting music to MIDI, both rhythms or melodies - but I do my own thing.
SP3 is great, obviously, but it was in the middle of boasting about the _new_ pen and how great it was.
Here's a blog post about the design of the app:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/developers/articles/week04ma...
Why wasn't handwriting recognition a big success?
The ability to write as you think/feel it and have the computer handle digitization is a big step, and hopefully allows composers to just write, without working around their software's limitations.
You get a sense of the experience watching the video: quarter notes are just a short diagonal line, all the note stems are perfectly vertical.
In a way, this problem space is perfect fodder for automation. If a musician can sightread off of your chicken-scratched sheet music, the computer will be able to do a decent job too.
'A quick slanted line is what StaffPad wants for quarter notes and smaller; simple circles or ovals for half notes and whole notes.'
http://www.sibeliusblog.com/news/staffpad-is-a-music-handwri...
I'd like to see this app being used for something simple-ish like the Prelude in C from Bach's WTC. The usual notation shows three independent lines - two in the left hand - and I don't know if the app has enough awareness of context to make that easy.
I haven't used Sibelius or Finale for a while, but last time I looked you had to enter the lines separately. You couldn't just "write" them in one pass and make them fit together, as you can on paper.
As for handwriting - I don't think anyone really wants it. QWERTY is faster, easier to read, and more accurate.
Symbol input (math, music, etc) is different. But for basic text, I don't think there's any clear advantage to using handwriting for input.
http://img.informer.com/screenshots/5045/5045272_3.jpg
Notice that "keypad" in the bottom right corner. That's the "on-screen custom keyboard" you're talking about.
But this isn't very convenient:
1. There are a lot of symbols. So many that the keyboard is divided up into six sub-keyboards. Unless you know the program well, it's a bit of a mystery where exactly to find the right symbol.
2. And it's actually more complicated than that because some of the symbols are actually modifiers of other symbols. For several of the symbols you see (sharp, natural, flat, dot, tie) you can't actually draw them independently, they only exist as attachments to another note. So the keypad works differently when you are dealing with those symbols.
3. Plenty of marks aren't even covered by the keypad and its six panels. For those you have to go searching in the numerous other menus in the app. You start getting a Microsoft Word-like problem: how do you design menu bars that show all the options without taking up the whole screen.
I really think it would be easier to draw what you mean -- if the app is actually good at recognizing what you mean.
The StaffPad app was reviewed at least 5 months ago [2] and truly does look very impressive, even if it's of particular interest for a relatively small demographic. I noted there was no mention in the SP4 announcement of the USB / sound device latency for the SP4 with W10 - so it's either so good we don't need to mention it, or a bit uncomfortable so best not to mention it.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.visionobje... [2] http://www.sibeliusblog.com/news/staffpad-is-a-music-handwri...
[Usual caveats apply...this is general advice, and I don't know your situation, etc.]
Soundslice isn't a score editor -- "just" a renderer (as if rendering sheet music is easy...!) -- so that influenced my decision. But if I were making an editor, I might make the same decision.
The reason is performance. A single piece of sheet music (a "score") might include thousands of individual glyphs, and if each one of those is a DOM element (as with SVG), the performance just wouldn't be as good as canvas.
One big tradeoff is that, with canvas, you need to implement your own hit detection (e.g., figure out what the user clicked on). But that's not super hard, and it's the kind of thing you write once and use forever.
Here's a tech talk I gave about an earlier version of Soundslice, where I talk about the canvas advantages: http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice
"In the Periscope, Ranjo was impressed with the grip of the iPad Pro's screen when used with the Pencil, and he also was a fan of the palm rejection features. When drawing on an iPad Pro, the palm of a hand can be rested on the screen, but it's still responsive to zoom gestures."
Aphex Twin should give it a whirl!
Would you prefer a technically playable piece by way of Michael Angelo Batio?
http://www.fundamental-changes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
...but will it do Guitar Tab?
Thousands of passionate staff-illiterate-to-barely-competent songwriting guitarists would probably like to know.
Edit: Went ahead and emailed through their contact form, I'm eager to find out what they say.
"Other programs already do that well," according to the response.
I love pen and paper for jotting down ideas or using it to solve problems, but it seems this medium is slowly going to take over due to the benefits of having a software tool analyzing your writing, and thus providing tools/suggestions/etc. along the way.
Located here: http://www.neuratron.com/notateme.html