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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Holy shit, this is amazing. For those that haven't written music before, previous programs are some of the clunkiest, slowest, most infuriating pieces of crap that I've ever had to deal with. This makes the process literally ten times easier, and so much more fun to use - and the MP3 export? Amazing.

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.

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It is a very cool piece of tech to be sure, but as a composer who has used notation programs almost daily for over a decade, this really doesn't solve any new problems, and it isn't anywhere near powerful enough for professionals (yet), so most will be importing files from StaffPad into Finale/Sibelius/etc.

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.

To write a string of 8 16th notes, for example ...

You haven't actually tried out the app have you? To do 8 16th notes, you just need to draw 8 small slanted lines.

If you want to explicitly enter 16th notes, you have to make it obvious to StaffPad that that's what you want, otherwise it can interpret the lines as 8th or 32nd notes, or a combination of those depending on where the notes fall in the measure. Again, for simple scores where the handwritten music is fairly obvious, it works fine. The key point is that the entry method slows down professional users, because you have to make sure you're doing things that the program can understand, which means taking time to place your marks methodically and reviewing every entry you make to make sure the program was correct to your intentions.

OK, but ... have you tried it out? You seem to be assuming quite a lot about how well it can interpret input.

it looks like you'd add dashes for the tails, just like you would for a semiquaver on paper. one of the great things about this is that there's zero 'design' to sheet music, its essentially a spec. There's a lot of implied information that can be fed into the handwriting recognition, and it looks like it doesn't try to parse until you've moved onto the next bar, so can analyze the block against a very well defined domain. Vertical lines all represent a note (besides small ticks for sharps maybe), and the time signature narrows this down to only so many possible permutations of possibilities.

I like to write music away from a desktop/laptop computer or keyboard, and this app seems to be a significant improvement over apps like Notion for that purpose. So I would say that it definitely does approach a problem in a new way, with potential to get closer to solving the workflow than any other mobile app thus far. I don't think it is fair to compare it to a MIDI keyboard workflow which is really a different environment than what this app would be useful for.

I guess this is the WYSIWYG thing all over again- in the beginning its nice to be able to see continuously what the finished document is going to look like, but after you become very fluent with the software having to draw everything or to manually fuss with the positions of stuff becomes very tedious. I'm far from being a professional, but with MuseScore I often find that I'm barely ever looking at the app since I'm concentrating on listening to the thing I'm transcribing and just using muscle memory to adjust the note durations with the keyboard; basically touch typing I guess. The professional arrangers I know are blindingly fast with Finale or Sibelius, kind of like watching a pro draftsman using CAD software, or a real recording engineer editing in Pro Tools.

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.

A couple thoughts (as someone who has spent a significant chunk of time using Sibelius):

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 have a bit of experience with transcription/engraving software. I completely agree that the process tends to be slow and frustrating, but I'm not sure if this really solves the problems. This looks like it could be nice for rapid prototyping, but I suspect it would be at least as equally frustrating if you're trying to get a professional end result where you have absolute control over everything.

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.

http://www.lilypond.org/

> For those that haven't written music before, previous programs are some of the clunkiest, slowest, most infuriating pieces of crap that I've ever had to deal with.

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.

never typed music... but i can't bring myself to believe there is no easy way to enter a note with 104 keys keyboard right in front of you... is it really that bad?

i would imagine one keystroke per note. maybe one modifier for things like several octaves out.

The problem is the combination of note length and the actual note. Add in multiple notes played at once and you hit the 3 key limit of most consumer keyboards before most groups would be finished.

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.

Well, if you're even remotely serious about it, you'd rather buy a midi keyboard rather then using a qwerty one.

Sure, but that's not what the parent I was responding to was suggesting. gbc0 was specifically talking about using a 104 key keyboard to write out music, so I addressed that option and it's pitfalls. Other people have addressed issues with the midi keyboard option though.

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.

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