Show HN: Composing Studio – An online, collaborative editor for music notation

Good job! and thanks for sharing. As a software developer I really like the textual music notation as I can version control them (Yes, musicXML exists but that is overcomplicated for me most of the time). But as a composer I can never work with these online textual editors. Mostly because my hands are accustomed to shortcuts that the big music editors offer (Sibelius and Finale for example). The thing is what these online music editors offer are really close to what composers like me want, but not there yet. I mean just adding shortcuts and translating them to ABC will turn this to a completely useful software for me as I really don't need other options of those software. Just as an example: 1.numbers change note length 2.abcdefg change notes 3.left right cursor to move like normal 4.up down cursor change note ... there are not a lot of them but having them makes the difference for me. http://www.sibelius.com/helpcenter/hintsandtips/G7Hints&Tips...

Kudos from a fellow developer who has also built a web-based music notation editor (https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/).

This is super exciting! I've been exploring this space of collaborative music editing too (and will shameless plug a multiplayer piano roll DAW I worked on [1]) and had some thoughts.

1. When collabing with friends it was slow for us to iterate because we (and a lot of people) just send files back and forth. It was hard to sketch things out without having some other kind of whiteboard. Of course others who can communicate musical ideas better through words probably would handle this a lot better.

2. Multiplayer editing was really fun in comparison. The magical moment is when you're working on some section and you listen to the song again and you realize someone else has added something on top of what you were doing earlier. It's like the song has taken on a life of its own.

3. Even with multiplayer it's still hard to coordinate and you can't get around planning even with rich tools. If the song was gonna be serious and not just doodles, we usually had to voice-chat to discuss what'll go in each section, then sorta divvy up parts. I guess the upshot is that even with the ability to be 'maximally' present with others, many people, myself included, work best with some amount of private creative freedom.

When I jammed in a bigger group, flows like relays or Monsquaz swap [2] that gave people that freedom, then at specific moments let them intermingle, seemed to work best for getting something out at the end. (If it was a free-for-all people usually ended up doing their own thing in some measures they staked for themselves out in the roll. Or otherwise people just spammed meme songs like Megalovania everywhere.)

[1] https://github.com/yuxshao/ptcollab [2] https://swap.monsquaz.org/

Awesome! I have an old project that generates ABC music notation. I made a context-free grammar to transform plain melodies into bluegrass banjo style. The output can be played & edited in Composing Studio: https://rrherr.github.io/banjo-grammar/

For example:

    T:Happy Birthday, bluegrass banjo style
    %%MIDI program 105
    K: G
    L: 1/16
    Q: 140
    D2 D2 E4 D4 G4 F8 D2 D2 E4 D4 A4 G8 D2 D2 d4 B4 G4 F4 E4 c2 c2 B4 G4 A4 G8
    Dd Dd Edgd Ddgd Gdgd FdgFdgFd Dd Dd Edgd Ddgd Adgd GdgGdgGd 
    Dd Dd ddgd Bdgd Gdgd Fdgd Edgd cd cd Bdgd Gdgd Adgd GdgGdgGd

This is great! As someone learning jazz, this type of collaborative tool can serve for sharing transcriptions with a remote teacher, and maybe even for teaching harmonic analysis (I'm not familiar with ABC notation, but I see it allows comments).

This is really neat and impressive! Can't believe there are only six votes and no comments.

Recently I was taking weekend music theory and composition lessons from a Masters student in a foreign country I met on Discord.

I will share this with him, I think he will appreciate it =)

Neat! I know virtually nothing about music, and I've never really been able to get the fingerings right on a piano, but I've always wanted to learn some music theory.

It might be fun to learn how to use something like this to start learning this stuff.

This looks really great, I'm looking forward to trying it out with my bandmates! (Who live in another state.)