Show HN: Our iPad app for music notation & composition | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Our iPad app for music notation & composition

symphonypro.net

6 pointsphlee5 comments

This is great. Bought, downloaded, and have some initial impressions. My background is that I do a metric crap load of arranging, primarily for the New York Holiday Singers ( http://newyorkholidaysingers.com ) in Sibelius, using the keyboard and keypad rather than MIDI input.

* First thing I did was export a PDF to see the engraving. Some quirks around that: - No title or composer showed up. - Measures of 8th notes in V2 were beamed all together rather than broken up. Kind of awkward looking. - I had four staves, all with treble clef, even though I'd kept the default piano layout with bass & treble.

* When adjusting an existing note's pitch, it would be nice to get the targeting lines that you get when adding a new note. Also, consider adding a zoom reticle off to the side of the finger location, please! :)

* I love the d-pad; what a great approach. I love the UI. I love the drag-area eraser. Great work. The UI is very concise, discoverable, and intuitive. I loved the text tool, and wish it could follow notes so I could do lyrics. I don't love that there was no obviously discoverable way to delete or add bars, though like i said it was only a brief run-through and i may have missed it.

* I wish there was a two hand mode when in landscape with the keyboard running vertically along the right edge so I could do rapid input with my left thumb choosing note lengths & the like and my right inputting the pitches.

* I also wish I could jump to a location in the score with a tap in the slider at the top instead of having to drag the handle. If it's possible, the hit targets may need adjustment.

These initial, few issues aside, I would /already/ use this app nearly full-time in a heartbeat if it had lyrics support. I'm sure you'll get a thousand feature requests! I always had a sneaking suspicion that editing sheet music on the iPad would be fantastic, and in the few minutes I used this app the incredible tactile connection to the music was already established. This far exceeds a MVP release, and was already worth my money. I can't wait to see where you take it next. Congrats!

I really appreciate the feedback. This is what drove at least 80% of the development time. We spent more time fixing issues and adding certain features that beta testers reported & requested than developing the gist of the application. (i.e. we thought we were done but actually were far from it - this was the obstacle I was talking about).

By the way, you can delete bars by tapping the gear icon and then tapping a measure to open a popover.

We will make a better PDF export system and advanced lyrics and chord notation support.

Again, many thanks.

We just released an iPad app called Symphony Pro. I'd like to know what you guys think! We applied to YC on the basis of music composition on the iPad last spring, didn't get in, but eventually pulled through. Development did take a while due to some obstacles.

Some Promo codes:

P6R7WHPKMNTP 63X7RFEPHTP6 4KKYR9TX7KNA

I can give more if they are used up

Have ben looking for that! The visual at least looks great. [EDIT: my bad - just saw the Promo codes.. thanks! ]

Today though I compose mostly playing so a MIDI interface in the future would be killer! :)

Downloading it now, although I won't be able to play with it until this evening. From what I can see in the screenshots on your web site, it looks beautiful. I'm especially interested in seeing how well the Lilypond export capability works, as I've experimented with that in the past.

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