Comment by Omnus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Omnus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com