Music notation software has long been seen as a two-horse race, a Pepsi versus Coke stand-off between Finale and Sibelius. But not only are there other alternatives, too, here’s one tool that’s making free and open source notation viable. I’ve spoken previously about engraving tool Lilypond, but it’s not entirely graphical, even with GUI front ends. MuseScore will look more familiar to users of something like Sibelius, and just as the latter released a major upgrade, it also had a big 1.1 release with major new enhancements.

MuseScore has a robust notation engine, capable feature set, and it’s even catching on in a number of academic institutions around the world. There’s an iPad-based score reader, which in turn is a revenue source (no reason open source software can’t generate income). You can enter music with keyboard, mouse, or MIDI, use the usual complement of symbols and layout features, and import and export both MusicXML and Standard MIDI files. You won’t find a big orchestral sample library as in Sibelius 7 and Finale’s Garritan-based sounds, but there’s still support for soft synth playback, and you can run for free on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s been translated into some 43 languages and counts more than 2500 downloads daily.

Given the coincidence of Sibelius and MuseScore getting their upgrades at the same time, I asked the MuseScore developers directly how they thought they compared. Let’s bring on the fighting words – after all, a little friendly competition drives better tools. (Ask the engineers on contests like Robot Wars.)

Improved interoperability also means you don’t have to choose sides. With MusicXML import/export in MuseScore and recently expanded in Sibelius 7, you can exchange files between the two tools – as you should. (After all, the whole point of notation is the ability for anyone to read it — for the exchange of ideas.)

First, here’s what’s new in MuseScore 1.1, with improvements like jazz and lead sheet functionality:

• Lead sheet enhancements, including MuseJazz jazz font, chord symbols on bars without notes, keyboard shortcuts for moving between bars, more chord symbols, and slash notation (via a plug-in) … see the beginner and advanced tutorials, and separate blog post.
• Connect is a Web-baed social feature for sharing scores, checking out tutorials, and following Twitter MuseScore discussion, all within the program. (Actually, I’m surprised more music software doesn’t do something like this.)
• Improved stability and reliability, including 60 bug fixes. To be honest, that’s probably what has held me back from spending much time with MuseScore, so I’m intrigued. This isn’t a review, but I’ll have to do some scoring work so I can try it out.

MuseScore isn’t as fully-functional as tools like Sibelius and Finale. For may purposes, it will do the job; it just lacks some of their maturity and extensive feature set, which means you should research its current features if you have particular notational needs. But that’s changing. On the roadmap for a more significant version 2.0 are critical notation features like tablature, and linked parts so you can edit music simultaneously in extracted parts and full score.

Sibelius versus MuseScore?

I asked MuseScore developer Thomas Bonte to follow up on how MuseScore relates to Sibelius with news of the two coinciding:

Well first off all, we have to be honest about it, Sibelius is a superb product. Many of my friends use it and I dropped the ambition to convert them to MuseScore However I learned that every year there is a new group of aspiring musicians following music education. The way we see it, is that MuseScore is growing up together with them.

MuseScore strongest selling proposition against Sibelius and others is it’s price: $0. While that seems an unbeatable price, MuseScore faces very steep competition from pirated versions of Sibelius or Finale. When I go around in music conservatories and I ask who has a legal version, only the teacher raises a hand. So MuseScore needs to do better than just the price and that’s where the Open Source kicks in.

If you look at it economically, it’s all about reducing production costs. Translations, documentation, import & export filters, plugins, … The only thing we (the core team) need to take care off is that the contributor community can work together. To facilitate this collaboration, we invested a tremendous amount of time in building a full featured community website on musescore.org using Drupal CMS. It is the main reason why the contributor community around MuseScore has doubled every release, up to 150 people for 1.0. You may have an open source project, but without people, that means nothing. And that’s how we really compete. With our community of contributors and users. The former improves the product, the latter does the promotion.

It’s just a matter of time before MuseScore can handle professional typesetting work. Via initiatives such as the Open Goldberg project, we want to show that MuseScore is getting ready for more demanding work.
Open Goldberg @ Kickstarter

One more thingy related to Sibelius: finally, Sibelius 7 has MusicXML export on board! A huge amount of users were asking us how they could convert their Sibelius files to MuseScore. (e.g. https://www.facebook.com/caleb.foreman/posts/10150374776437678 ) The Dolet plugin was obviously way overpriced to be a democratic solution. This is a huge relief now for e.g. educators, who have lots of material in Sibelius and wanted to convert it for their students who are using MuseScore.

Some of Sibelius 7′s features do have comparable features in MuseScore – and in some instances, MuseScore was first. Thomas observes:

MuseScore had a tabbed document interface (like a web browser) since the start of the project
MuseScore is of course native 64 bit (if compiled on a 64 bit machine)
PDF export has also been there from the beginning
Multi core playback is not available in MuseScore but the synthesizer runs in a second thread (so at least dual core)
MuseScore had import of SVG images since many years now
Upcoming MuseScore 2.0 has full screen support

Version 2.0 is likely to be the big release, in my mind; we’ll be watching. Thomas says they’re also working on improved branding and visual appearance in preparation for that release, and all of this is boosted, he says, by revenue from the iPad score reader. That makes an interesting new model for free and open source software.

A side note, as my biggest criticism of the free engraving tool Lilypond at the moment is its lack of two-way MusicXML file interchange. Thomas notes:

MuseScore has been able read and write MusicXML for several years now.

MuseScore exports Lilypond. It used to have Lilypond import as well, but that was dropped in 0.9.6 because it was better to spend out limited resources on improving MusicXML import. We expected to see MusicXML export in Lilypond anyway, but apparently that’s far from trivial since it still didn’t happen.

And what about compatibility for ABCjs, a JavaScript-powered, text-based notation format so simple it’s been implemented on mobile phones and Web browsers?

Yes there is. And the way this works is a very nice example of how hackable MuseScore is. It’s written out nicely in this post here but basically what happens is: a plugin in MuseScore let’s you browse for the ABC file, it then sends the ABC file to a web service at http://abc2xml.appspot.com which is made by one of the MuseScore developers, and finally that web service sends MusicXML back. Et voilà. (Note: as stated on the announcement: The webservice uses ABC4J. ABC4J supports ABC 1.6 only)

And for more comparison:

We made a comparison table between Sibelius and MuseScore:
Google Spreadsheets Comparison

This may help you to get an idea where MuseScore is and where version 2.0 is heading.

One note: MusicXML export is not available in Sibelius Student or First. Only in Sibelius 7. Bummer.

I think it should be plainly obvious: there’s room for more than one notation tool. There’s room for more than two notation tools. Competition between tools can drive capabilities forward, and better motivate tools to match what users need. Free and proprietary tools can both learn from one another, and even exchange files – there isn’t a gulf between free and open source and proprietary as some may have found in the past. The availability of better tools means the expanded ability of musicians to express themselves.

And MuseScore is becoming a viable option for notation. That can only be a good thing. If you use it in your work – or you have anything you’d like to share about how you create digital … scores – we’d love to hear from you.

http://musescore.org/

Industry titans Google, Amazon, and now Apple have each launched “cloud” music services. Yet, despite being connected via the Internet by design, these services are primarily concerned with solo listening. Even with Google’s various social efforts (+1 and the like), or Apple’s fledgling if not-exactly-blockbuster service Ping, there’s little to suggest that sharing with friends online was even a consideration. All of this raises the question: what should listening look like now that we’re connecting to music through the Internet, instead of through the headphone jack of our Walkman? Against that background, writer Primus Luta (David Dodson) offers a guest editorial on the potential of social music and new means of listening.

I’d like to start this off with a proposal. Despite the incredible innovations that have developed in music in the past few decades, none can match the impact of the one pictured above: the Sony Walkman.  To understand my rationale, separate the music from the business.  Though the Walkman had a clear impact on the music industry, what it did for the listener’s experience was the seed for most of the innovations that followed.

When I was growing up, the whole idea of personal listening was limited to one’s ability to find a closed room with a stereo system.  When you played something, everyone within earshot heard it, be it my mom rocking Olatunji while she cleaned house, my sister bumping David Bowie, or my aunt throwing back to Etta James.  I did have a small radio I used to listen to Casey Kasem count down the top 40 in my room, but for the most part, when someone listened to music, everyone did.  Outside, boom boxes reigned supreme: you’d hear what someone was blasting as they walked down the block then hit the record store to track it down.

Then came the Walkman, which allowed for private music listening in any environment.  There were a lot of benefits to this, not the least of which was my mom not having to hear the 2 Live Crew I was nodding my head to (or even knowing I was listening to it, shhhhh).  Over the years, however, this privatization of music listening has led to a decrease in spaces for social listening or even recognizing that listening to music is a social experience.

This piece began with a simple tweet from CDM editor Peter Kirn, in which he made a tongue in cheek reference to music being his favorite anti-social experience.  The comment stuck out for me because I’d recently been using two services which sought to restore the meaning of social listening.  Both services move away from the networking aspect of the social movement, assuming you already have the network of friends you’d like to listen to music with, and jumping straight into the practical by providing a virtual space where you and those friends can listen to music together.

“As a teenager,” Abe Fettig, the developer behind The Listening Room shares,  ”it seemed like any time I was with friends, shooting baskets, playing videogames or riding around in someone’s car, there was music playing. So even though I listened to commercial radio a lot back then, I think most of the music I fell in love with came to me via having a friend who owned the album play it for me.

“I had been thinking about how listening to music with other people, and talking about what you’re listening to, is a fun thing to do, and something I wished I could do more,” he shares on the inspiration for The Listening Room. “There’s something about the conversation that makes it more fun than just hearing the song.”  Inspired by NPR podcasts of a similar format, Abe and his friend Luke began a blog.  ”We both listened to a song at the same time, talked about it in real time, and published our chat to the blog.”

For better or for worse the blog wasn’t the biggest success, but the idea behind it stuck with Abe.  ”Reading about HTML5 audio, and I thought it would be a fun experiment to build an app that would stream an mp3 file from one person’s web browser so another person could hear it in their browser. So I started with that, and immediately felt like I was onto something good.”

Similar thoughts were at play in Denmark, as Esben Milan, one of the developers behind MuMu Player, explains: “I thought about making a live whiteboard where creative people could meet in a online space and draw, write and create projects together. My good friend had a similar idea for an office player where everybody in the office could control the physical speakers.”  From this, MuMu Player was born.

Five users share a playlist, love of music and laughs in MuMu Player

While there are parallels between the two services, the executions and experiences do differ.  With MuMu Player, a central playlist layout manages social interaction.  ”Everybody in the player can upload music and re-arrange the playlist – and the music plays in sync. That’s it. It’s the virtual way of when friends listen to music together in real life.”  MuMu Player’s simplicity makes it quite intuitive.  The shared playlist shows everyone’s uploads in the order in which they will be played and a side bar area is set aside for chatting while the music plays.  One of the biggest differences between the two services is that MuMu is limited to five listeners per room.  There are advantages to this, especially when managing the playlist and following conversations in the chat window.  Overall, it makes the experience feel very intimate.

The Listening Room abandons the centralized playlist and has no user limit, but because of that, operates a little differently. “Any registered user can create a room and add songs. When a song plays everyone in the room hears it, and sees the record spinning with album art. Any user — even those who haven’t registered — can drop in on a room to listen and chat. The chat is in sync with the music, so as you scroll down the page you can see what people said next to what was playing at the time.”  What plays isn’t as immediately intuitive as with MuMu.  The shared playlist is replaced with a personal queue of songs which only you can see and rearrange.  When multiple users have songs in their queue, the room will alternate between user queues to pull selections.  As there are no user limits on an individual room, it takes away the hassle of having to worry about playlist management, though without being able to see what someone has in their queue until it plays it makes the song selection a little less interactive.

Ultimately, though, the thing that makes both services is the ability to converse about music in real time.  Not only can you play your friend that song, you can key them in on a specific part of it.  Discover the six degrees that separate your interest in shoegaze from your friend’s death metal collection.  And how are you supposed to know what minimal witch house is until someone you trust plays it for you?

I wish I could end this piece right here: try them both and see what works for you.  Either way, you’ll surely discover the joy true social listening inspires.  Unfortunately, though, both of these involve a hot topic of discussion in the IP world — streaming rights.  Both services do everything they can to adhere the rules as they exist today, but there’s reason for concern.

“Its a very complex area,” Esben explains. “We believe MuMu is legal, like it is legal for groups of people to listen to music together in real life. Everything in MuMu is also made with that in mind. By example, when a user exits a player his or her’s songs automatically is removed from playlist.”

“The United States has what’s called statutory licensing  for ‘non-interactive’ broadcasters,” Abe says. “The statutory license means that you don’t have to negotiate your own deal with the music labels – there are predefined terms available to anyone, as long as your service meets the definition of non-interactive, which basically means the listener doesn’t get to choose exactly what they want to hear on demand (Pandora is non-interactive, for example). So I designed The Listening Room to meet the qualifications for a non-interactive service. And my company pays SoundExchange [an entity that represents labels and artists] as well as BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC [which represent songwriters and publishers] fees for all the music that gets played.”

So far, there have been no legal actions against the services, but considering they are breaking into a new realm of streaming service, how that will hold up is uncertain.  That both are aware of the issues bodes for their ability to adjust should things change.

The Listening Room
MuMu Player

Ed.: Do let us know if you try these services, and what you think of the challenges social listening faces, and potential it holds – technological, legal, and personal. I noticed a headline the other day claiming people were using smart phones as quasi-boomboxes, albeit via the internal speaker, but that still seems a poor substitute. Can social listening translate online? -PK

SoundCloud for iPhone from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

While it’s easy to focus on one platform or another, a profound trend in 2010 has been toward sharing media in the cloud. The basic concept is as old as the Internet, but from applications like Instamatic for photographers to syncing storage to tote around documents on iPads, this has been a year in which the server-shared media seemed to become a bigger part of our lives.

Sound could be next. Aptly-named service SoundCloud has added a big, red “record” button both to an updated iPhone app and the Web browser-based dropbox. That means you can tote an iPhone or iPod touch with the SoundCloud app, and record and upload, say, a field recording or rehearsal set all in one go. Or someone could leave a voice greeting or record a quick demo for you right on your site.

The service didn’t have to do anything to make this possible; it’s just a clever interface around recording, using native iOS features on mobile and Flash in the browser. (To me, actually, seeing HTML5-based support would be even bigger news, but a lot of HTML5 goodness requires waiting.) When you hit record, you use the same recording function that was always there; the app just takes care of the upload so there isn’t an extra step. SoundCloud confirms to CDM that there’s no change to the underlying APIs. For developers, there’s really nothing stopping you from building SoundCloud “recording” into any mobile or Web-connected tool.

The main questions for developers and users is, when is this the right choice? I had to explain to SoundCloud why I preferred Dropbox connectivity in mobile apps to SoundCloud – for me, the hierarchy and file system integration in Dropbox trumps the sharing features in SoundCloud for certain apps. I might want to record a bunch of samples to manipulate later in Dropbox; I don’t really need to share with anyone. Conversely, though, if sharing is your main goal, SoundCloud is easier. I expect we’ll see more of this kind of differentiation – and head-scratching about the best workflow – in the future. (Cue someone in comments mentioning free, old-fashioned, no-subscription-required tools like rsync.)

For the same reason, it’s worth noting that there’s more to the recent iPhone app and API SoundCloud updates than just recording. Apps will in the near future will be able to more easily connect to services like Facebook and Twitter. Those tools have been the “glue” that have made things like the faux-Polaroid and Holga apps for iPhone become so viral. It’ll be interesting to see if sound can make the same impression.

Then again, I think it’s worth noting that the biggest news this week came out of plain text you could copy and paste. The Google Translate beatbox, defying any rational explanation, became perhaps the biggest sound and music meme I’ve seen all year. And maybe that proves the point: the familiar copy-and-paste means of spreading it was something anyone could understand. There’s a lesson there, certainly.

In the meantime, SoundCloud is looking a lot more useful. Now, it’s just a matter of finding the most productive way to use it – and, oh yeah, finding some sounds.

The SoundCloud iPhone/iPod touch app is free on Apple’s App Store.

Sharing Note by Weatherman

Capture And Share Your Sounds [SoundCloud Blog]

What’s a social network for music discovery if there aren’t any artists? As covered previously, Apple’s Ping on launch was a pretty big flop. With no custom artist pages, artists felt left out of the party – and would-be users found themselves scratching their heads as iTunes mindlessly recommended U2 and Lady Gaga to everyone.

At the very least, as expected, we should start to see artists appear on Ping – and now there’s a way for you to be one of those artists, if you desire.

Ping’s reliance on the iTunes client and exclusively music purchased from the iTunes store remains worrisome, but if you’re an artist whose music is on iTunes and want to get in front of some extra eyeballs, we’ve got good news. TuneCore is a service designed to help artists distribute their music by managing the complexities of the various digital storefronts out there. That makes them a natural choice for helping get artists onto Ping – even if your music is in other places, too (like eMusic, Amazon, and Amie Street).

TuneCore was apparently on the phone with Apple the day Ping launched. And they now have Artist Ping accounts live. Here’s the full story, with some additional thoughts from TuneCore for CDM.

TuneCore posted an update at the beginning of this week announcing that they had set up Ping artist pages for their TuneCore artists:
Artist Ping Accounts [TuneCore blog]

Excerpt:

First an artist, or their representative, is verified as the authorized person to control the Artist Ping account (i.e. no, you cannot pretend to be Iggy Pop). This is done via TuneCore coordinating with TuneCore Artists and then relaying information to Apple.

Once this info is received by Apple, Apple emails out a unique url link specific to the artist, this link is then clicked on, when its clicked on the iTunes software opens in your browser and says “Ping Aritst Account” – it will ask you to log in with your iTunes user name/password or you can create a new iTunes account just for your Ping Artist account.

Whatever account you use to log in will be part of your Ping Artist Account. One of the things the Ping Artist and People account will do is display what you bought via that account on your Ping page.

So, if you are Motorhead and you buy the Strawberry shortcake “Rockaberry Roll” album (and yes, that is the name of a real album, I just looked it up) – this will appear on your Ping Artist Page.

Once in your Ping account you will be able to upload assets, etc. There may be a slight delay before they appear as Apple will check to assure the movies/images are not pornographic.

So, the bad news here to me is that there’s not really a whole lot of interaction on the page – for now, at least, a lot of this is just you buying music from iTunes. But if you’re willing to put in the time, and you have a lot of fans or listeners on iTunes, at least you now have a pretty easy avenue to get there. (Many readers’ response to Ping was, in part, social network fatigue, so I think it’s really in Apple’s court to provide more compelling reasons for artists to bother. Then again, you know your iTunes sales, and that may be the deciding factor.)

For their part, TuneCore defends the added work for the verification process:

There are literally millions of bands on iTunes. Apple has to come up with a way to authenticate that the entity that lays claim to the Radiohead etc Ping Artist page is actually authorized to do so.

To control this, there has to be a manual process (at least at inception) where Apple literally reaches out to an artist via the entity that provided iTunes the music so they can assure the control for that Artist’s Ping page is actually the person/entity that has the right to do so.

This would be consistent with the high quality experience that Apple provides. It’s an Apple process that many others do not do.

That makes some sense – see also the verified accounts on Twitter. On the other hand, to me the real challenge on Ping isn’t only opening up artist accounts, but providing a reason for artists to go there, and that remains to be seen.

Jeff Prince from TuneCore provided some additional information on how this works, including some best-guess attempts outside TuneCore.

CDM: Can you tell me – obviously there are advantages to going through TuneCore, but how would an artist work directly with Apple if they don’t work with TuneCore?

Jeff: Whatever entity the artist used to get their music into iTunes would be the default go to – there are exceptions (i.e. a huge multi-national act signed to a major may have its own pre-existing relationship with Apple where the management company has previously been verified).

As for TuneCore’s part, can any TuneCore artist go through your process — assuming their music is on iTunes?

Yes.

Any indication yet whether this will start to correct the current follower suggestions from Apple (i.e., the fact that everyone is supposed to be a Lady Gaga fan)?

My guess is that the algorithm’s need information/data to get more accurate. As more people sign up and use Ping, there is more data which allows the suggestions to get more accurate/interesting. But to me the real value is in the curated suggestions by People/Artists, not so much the automated recommendations.

Thanks, Chris. Well, so, folks, if you do hop on there and like what you see, feel free to share your experiences and Ping artist pages. And if you’re still unimpressed, well, of course, we’ll continue to look at other options for social music online, of which Ping is just one.

You probably think of social networking and messaging as being about text, about saying things like “Wow, this tuna salad sandwich I’m having for lunch is delicious!” But the next Tweet you get on Twitter could be a synthesis preset.

Say what?

Working in Max/MSP, Andrew Spitz has developed a tool called Tweet a Sound. It uses Twitter as a communications platform for “social sound design.” Instead of just saying, “Wow, I be makin’ phat basslines,” you can actually share the sound. Whip up a sound using typical FM synth parameters and Max/MSP’s sound engine, then click “send.” You’ll send a string of numbers to your Twitter account, confusing those friends not in the know. But other users will be able to grab and play with your sound.

Andrew even encourages synthesis n00bs to play without fear – grab those envelopes and mysterious-looking settings and see what comes out. So, I hope you synth geeks do share this with some friends new to synthesis, as I think they’ll have a great time.

Right now, Tweet a Sound is Mac-only; we just need someone to save a Windows standalone version. Someone has asked about a Pd port, but let’s put it this way: this is the tip of a very, very big iceberg of sharing. It’s something worth considering in anything you’re doing, not just with Twitter, but whether you can provide networked capabilities in whatever you’re happening to build.

Ableton, of course, recently added the Share functionality to Live. But with open APIs and basic networking protocols, there’s no reason you can’t explore other features. Why not build a drum machine that lets you collaborate with one of your friends on your IM list, or a sequencer that automatically posts ideas as you revise them? Just doing these things for the sake of it could be a waste of time, but on the other hand, these social features could turn Web 2.0 sites into places that actually inspire you to make and share music rather than distract you with mundane activities.

I love the idea; let us know if you have some fun with it.

Tweet A Sound { sound + software } [Andrew Spitz Blog]