Proprietary systems like FreeHand’s awkwardly-named MusicPad Pro Plus (Pro Plus, eh?) have offered digital manuscript paper for some time. But the idea there is you buy dedicated hardware; the MusicPad Pro Plus is US$899. With tablet PCs starting at about the same price, and the convenience of having your mobile computer also be your music notation, it seems like the convergence of the manuscript page and the computer isn’t far off.

Enter MusicReader for Windows XP and Vista. It runs just US$69-99; bring your own laptop. Better yet, bring your own tablet PC and you have a form factor that fits naturally on a music stand and can be marked up with digital ink. Turn pages with a tap or foot pedal.

Sheet Music 2.0 [Wired.com, via the tablet lovers at GottaBeMobile.com]

With the ultra-thin machine on its way (witness new ultra-thin laptops from Apple and Lenovo, and upcoming low-power, tiny chips from Intel), the future looks even better. Here’s a video of the system in action, lest you think this would never appear in the real world (suggestion: you may want to mute the sound, as the background score is a bit …unnecessary):

Mac users, looks like you’re booting into Boot Camp for now. Too bad Apple still doesn’t think we want a tablet.

Reading notation is good fun, but what if you could write it, too? A little-noticed, open-source tool from researchers at Brown University does just that on Windows Tablet PCs, and even made a brief, official appearance as a Microsoft PowerToy. The recognition is surprisingly satisfying once you learn the shortcuts, which resemble Palm Graffiti strokes. Finally, in 2005 the developers added MIDI export, making this a potentially useful tool. If there’s someone out there with a newish Vista tablet, I’d be curious to know if this still works on modern machines.

To me, the ability to write as well as read makes things far more interesting. But for about a hundred bucks — well, plus whatever your tablet PC cost — you’ve got digital music paper right now.

Music Notepad for Tablet PC

Does any of this actually matter to you? Blogger Tom Whitwell asked that of his readers, and found the answer is, well, sorta:

Can Music Thing readers read music? [Music Thing]

With some software tools, less is more. When it comes to the complexity and breadth of music notation tools, though, more is often more, because everyone’s needs are different. If the “pro”, “high-end” tool happens to do exactly what you need to do efficiently and quickly, that’s the tool you’re most likely to use — even if your notation needs are “modest” in your own eyes. In other words, if you use only 10% of the capabilities of the tool, but everyone’s different 10% is included, you’ve got a winner. And that’s probably part of why two major rivals continue to dominate mindshare in notation, Finale and Sibelius. Finale is on an annual release schedule, compared to Sibelius’ semiannual appearances. 2007 is one of the years the two coincide, with releases shipping almost exactly simultaneously next month.

We took a first peek at what’s new in Sibelius 5: massive plug-in support, an ideas hub, and other enhancements. Here’s what’s doing in Finale 2008 (keeping in mind Finale spreads new features out across annual releases):

Sibelius 5 is a big upgrade to the notation tool, now part of Avid. The biggest change of all: real VST and Audio Unit plug-in support on Mac and Windows. This merging of audio software and scoring software has been a long time coming. We saw limited support in Finale, but Sibelius actually fully supports racks of VST and AU instruments and effects to use on your scores, integrating with the Sibelius mixer for playback control, and merging into groups for control of sections of your orchestra/ensemble. There’s even MIDI control: the Sib site says “… if you have an M-Audio keyboard you can use its own faders and transport buttons to control Sibelius’s playback.” Wow, terrific! (Um, I’m guessing that will work for any MIDI keyboard once you assign the proper controllers, not just M-Audio hardware — but still good news.)

In case you want out-of-the-box instruments and not just plug-ins, Sibelius now includes 2 GB of orchestral, band, and other instruments from Garritan and others.

Also new in this version:

It’s already near-impossible to find a new computer that doesn’t have Vista already installed on it. As I’ve noted here, hardware driver compatibility can be a bumpy road. That’s the bad news. The good news is, application compatibility for Windows Vista is often not as big an issue. Music notation software, for instance, largely works, with a couple of additional notes regarding installation and registration.

Vista Compatibility for Notation Products [Finale / SmartMusic customer support]
Windows Vista compatibility [Sibelius]

These links come via a promising new blog/podcast for music educators, Music Tech for Me.

Both Finale and Sibelius (and various other tools from SmartMusic and Sibelius for education) are listed as “compatible” with Vista. There’s even a promised update specific to Vista from Finale for the summer. The only hitch is User Account Control (UAC) for software like Sibelius under Vista. Fortunately, disabling UAC isn’t so bad.

As a quick recap, some applications may actually perform more smoothly under Vista. Cakewalk SONAR, for instance, has robust support for the new WaveRT audio system (if you have a PCI audio card that supports it) and MMCSS scheduling. Be aware, though, that those marginal improvements can be quickly erased by driver issues elsewhere in the system, which have a tendency to domino when it comes to both stability and performance.

We could debate this all day, so I’ll just say this: there are still a number of cases where you would “downgrade” (upgrade?) a new Vista computer to XP, even if it means ponying up for a boxed copy of XP, and as with any major OS update on any platform, I wouldn’t even think of installing without a backup and rollback plan to the previous OS. If you can, test on a dual-boot system; it’ll make uninstalling easier.

Digidesign is fond of incremental upgrades with smaller improvements, and today’s release of Pro Tools 7.3 should bring some nice work enhancements to Pro Tools users.

The most intriguing new feature is called “Send to Sibelius”, a single button that allows you to transfer music from the MIDI tracks in a Pro Tools project to Sibelius for notation. Before you get too excited, though, there’s nothing really unique here other than the button. According to a thread on Sibelius’ help forum (registration required), this feature only exports MIDI data and imports in Sibelius. That’s possible in every competing DAW. Frankly, I’m glad to hear this, because I’d rather see more interoperability between notation software and all music tools — we should get to choose our favorite tools, not have them chosen for us by large corporate owners (hello, Avid/Digidesign acquisition of Sibelius).

Other improvements actually turn out to be more significant — but this upgrade does cost:

Nat Jeanneret aka “funnel”, the musician and artist behind the CDM site design, has been busy at work on a new project: creating music my scoring those little spots of gum and dirt found on a train platform. It’s a great example of aleatoric music, not in the best-known sense of “pure” chance but in reflecting the patterns found in the world around the composer.

Nat has made a video, as well, in which you can watch him convert bubble gum-on-platform music to Sibelius digital notation. It’s the ultimate digital music, in a way: the analog (erm, disgusting old bubble gum) is overlaid on a real-world grid (the lines of the platform) and quantized to 5-line staff notation.

Full details from Nat:

Aleatoric Music Composition [onetonnemusic]
Aleatoric Composition… THE MOVIE! [onetonnemusic]

Composers out there, if you’ve ever done anything similar, we’d love to hear about it.

Sibelius Software Ltd., maker of the popular Sibelius music notation software, has been acquired by Avid’s pro audio division, Digidesign, maker of Pro Tools. That means Sibelius joins M-Audio in industry-leading products in Digidesign’s portfolio. Here’s the official word from Sibelius co-creator/co-founder Ben Finn:

I’m delighted to inform you that Sibelius Software Ltd has been acquired by Digidesign, the audio division of Avid Technology Inc.
…

Digidesign has acquired Sibelius because of its strong brand and expertise in music education and its advanced notation technology, not to mention its loyal user base.

Day to day, there will be no major changes to the running of the business ­our existing management team remain in place, and we will continue to develop all our existing products as before. Looking forward, there will be new possibilities for linking Sibelius’s products with both Digidesign’s and M-Audio’s ranges of software and hardware solutions.

Rivalries are good: they keep software developers competitive, leapfrogging each other in features. They keep the pressure on, and having seen what happens when one company gets a monopoly (Microsoft Office, I’m looking at you), progress generally slows. Notation users have benefited from the Finale/Sibelius rivalry, and that competition continues to produce better and better notation software. Finale 2007 looks like it will continue that trend.

Now, I’ve gotten in trouble before when I’ve said Finale was blatantly copying its music notation rival Sibelius. But I don’t think anyone can argue with me this time. The major features in Sibelius 4: parts linked to full score, and integrated video support and film scoring features. The major features in Finale 2007, based on a marketing email I just got from Finale:

1. Parts linked to full score
2. Integrated video support and film scoring features
3. Intel Mac native support

Sounds familiar, huh? Now, honestly, these were really features that both packages would inevitably add, so I’m glad to see Finale continuing to level the playing field.

Now that the rest of our studio has gone digital, the approach to producing score for acoustic instruments has changed, too. Here’s a look at some of my favorite toys and tools for keeping music flowing.

You’d have to be a true Luddite to argue that word processors are bad for writing. Blogs, perhaps, sometimes inspire poor writing (ahem), but it’s more difficult to blame technology. The original argument that word processors would end the process of drafting and revision is absurd to anyone who’s spent long hours slaving over text in Microsoft Word. Our attitudes have changed as we’ve grown accustomed to the technology.

When it comes to music notation, though, there’s still an uncomfortable relationship between composers and computer scoring. That’s understandable: producing a score is a lot more involved than typing words, and even with modern software filled with keyboard shortcuts, scoring music is slow in any medium. But, even as some traditionalist composition teachers preach against the “evils” of computer notation (you know who you are), I think computers are becoming part of an elaborate digital creation process, even for composers working on entirely acoustic scores. Leaving out the tried-and-true methods of drinking tea/coffee, stopping for sandwich breaks, and outright procrastination, here are the tools I consider essential to my studio: