Release Notes -- June 2010
New in Release 2.1
Crescendo Features
- Individual Part Extraction and Printing
You can now work with individual parts from a score without
changing the score in any way. Crescendo's Individual
Parts feature lets you view, edit or print any combination of
parts from a full score, with a shortcut command to quickly print
out all parts on separate pages. Parts have their own separately
controlled staff size.
- Audio Mixing Panel
Crescendo now lets you change the volume and stereo position of
each individual part. You can also mute and solo parts to hear
any desired combination.
- Guitar Tab Goodness
In Crescendo, you can now add string bends, releases, slides, hammer-on/pull-off,
muted strings and numerous other guitar effects and articulations.
- Colored and Hidden Notes
Crescendo's new color palette lets you apply colors to notes
and symbols, or hide them completely.
- String Instrument Techniques
Crescendo now supports arco, pizzicato and spiccato techniques
for bowed string instruments, as well a string/palm muting for
guitars.
Noteflight Features
- Editing Palette Changes
We've split the advanced palette into several different pieces
to make room for the new features introduced in this release.
This provides for a cleaner, less cluttered design with more room
for expansion.
- Tempo Changes
At long last, you can change tempos during the course of your
piece. Noteflight supports metronome markings with variable
beat units and beats per minute.
- Lines
Noteflight now supports many different kinds of line notations
spanning multiple notes and measures, including 8va/8vb, piano
sustain pedal, trills, and more.
- Stemless Notes
- Cue Notes
- Single Note Tremolos
Tremolos on a single note are now available. They're good for
drum rolls, among other things.
- Copyright Footer
Fixes and Improvements
- Mouse wheel support on Macintosh
- Much faster initial score display, score pages now only laid out when shown or played.
- Major improvements to mouse-based note entry in situations where staves and other controls are positioned close to each other.
- Improvements in MIDI file export.
New Features in Release 2.0
- Playback of Repeats and Endings
Music with repeats and multiple endings is now played back
with the correct musical form. This is the first part of a series
of changes that will support other form-related notations such as
coda, segno, and others.
- Instruments
- Playback in instrument panel
It is now possible to try out instrument sounds from
within the popup that offers a choice of instruments,
making the selection process much easier.
- Crescendo Instruments
In Noteflight Crescendo, we now have over 50 instruments
covering a wide range of instrument families. These
instruments include a number of guitars and basses,
available in both standard notation and tab.
- Guitar Tablature (Noteflight Crescendo only)
Crescendo supports guitar and bass tablature, opening
Noteflight up to a wide variety of new creative purposes and a
broader audience.
- Optional rhythm display
Noteflight can optionally show flags, beams, dots, rests and ties
in tab notation, resulting in a type of tab that conveys more information
and is intermediate between simpler forms of tab and conventional notation.
- Copy and paste between regular and tab notation
You can easily move music back and forth between regular staves
and tab staves, making it a breeze to create scores that use either
or both formats.
- Easily shift string and fret positions of any note
It's very easy to move notes on a tab staff to different strings
while preserving pitch, or to simply change frets or octaves on any note.
- Noteflight Crescendo Sharing Features
- Share with Individuals
Crescendo allows you to share a score with only the
users you want to be able to see it, and with the exact
access that you specify for each person.
- Activity Templates
Crescendo gives you the ability to create a special type of score
that is automatically copied when other users open it. The copies are linked
to the original so that you can look at them and collaborate or communicate
with these other users' work.
- Noteflight Crescendo New Score Templates
In Crescendo, you can pick from a library of common score types when you
first create a score including typical ensembles and combos.
- Login by User Name
- Parts Menu Rearrangement
- Sound engine improvements
Our new playback engine is much faster and supports some
important features that are not released yet but are on the way,
like mixing and panning.
- Flash Player 10 Requirement
New Features in Release 1.4
- Slurs and Hairpin/Wedge Dynamics
- Slurs or phrase markings may now be applied to passages. They
affect playback. The position and shape of each slur can be
altered to place the slur exactly where desired.
- "Hairpin" or "wedge" dynamics may now be applied to passages.
Unlike slurs, hairpins do not affect playback. The position and
slope of hairpins can be altered to place them exactly where
desired.
- Pickup bars are easier to work with.
- We've improved the way that pickup bars (anacruses) work, so
that it's a less cumbersome operation. Creating a pickup bar no
longer generates extra bars that have to be deleted, and it
automatically trims off the start of the full bar from which the
pickup is created.
- Score text notation improvements.
- Performance text used to only belong to the top staff in a
score. It can now go anywhere, and can be cut, copied, pasted, or
dragged and dropped.
- All flavors of text objects including performance text,
expression text and dynamics may now be dragged in any direction to
fine tune their position.
- Improved playback of dynamics and accents.
- A number of problems with dynamics and accents have been
resolved. Dynamics on a grand-staff instrument such as piano
now affect the correct set of staves depending on their
placement. Also, a bug resulting in the omission of
marcato-accented notes has been fixed.
- Interval transposition affects entire score by default.
- Transposing by an interval now affects the whole score if
nothing is selected, since this is a sensible default.
- Improved support for AOL browsers.
- Noteflight now aggressively disables page caching for AOL, a
problem which caused some customers to be unable to access their
scores after logging in.
- Detection of score document transmission errors to server.
- The Noteflight server now checks that saved scores are
valid, so as to detect and report a common problem caused by
Mac OS Parental Controls in conjunction with Firefox.
New Features in Release 1.3
- We've changed our navigation system a little bit.
- Instead of My Scores, you'll see My Home, under
which are tabs for Scores, Favorites
and Profile. Other users' member pages have changed in a
similar way, but without the Profile tab (since you can only
change your own).
- Instead of Browse Scores, you'll find Browse,
under which are tabs for All Scores and Top Scores. The Top
choice shows the scores with the most favorites that have been
created in various time ranges.
- Users can choose scores as "favorites".
- When looking at a score by someone else that has been
published for searching and browsing, you can make this score one
of your "favorites". This puts it in a special list of favorites
that is available on your home page.
- When you are looking at a score that already has favorites,
you can see which other users liked it. Clicking on a user's name
takes you to their member page.
- When looking at another user's member page, you can see their
favorites list to find out what they like (and they can see
yours, too).
- The new Top Scores pages on Noteflight show which scores are
the favorites of the most users in various time periods.
- Users can add comments to scores.
- Scores can now have any number of textual comments attached to
them, separately from the music. You can always comment on your
own scores, and you can delete any comments in your scores. You
can also delete comments that you make in other users'
scores.
- Other users can't add comments to a score unless you allow
this, by using the Sharing Panel to enable comments. Users must
be signed in to comment, so that you can tell who made each
comment.
- User profiles now include Facebook and Twitter user names.
- We're not going to reinvent social networking! Instead, we're
now allowing our users to share their Facebook and Twitter
user names on our site to make it easier to get in touch with
each other, and to share info about what they're doing on Noteflight.
- We're thinking about how to best integrate with services like
these in the future for activity feeds, messages, and so on.
- Everyone now has a default avatar.
- Along with all the other changes, user images or "avatars" are
now defaulted to a Noteflight logo if you don't supply your own.
- Noteflight Learning Edition customers can now make an existing
score into an activity template using the Sharing Panel.
Significant Bug Fixes:
- Improvements in playback audio performance.
- Improvements in overall website performance and scalability.
New Features in Release 1.2
- MIDI files may now be imported into Noteflight.
-
MIDI type 0 and type 1 files can be imported into Noteflight. Rhythms
are quantized, and users can control various aspects of quantization
and interpretation via a set of options. Time signatures and key signatures
are handled correctly. Unsupported features include triplet quantization,
inferred key changes when no key signature is present, and tempo changes.
- A set of important enhancements and extensions have been made to chord symbols:
-
Figured bass/basso continuo is now supported in regular chord
symbols, which can now occupy more than one line of text. For
instance, "6 b3" or "6" followed by "b3" on the next line will
produce a figured bass of 6 and flat 3. Accidentals may be used
standalone as one would expect, e.g "b" is a single flat. Note that
this approach winds up supporting musica ficta and fingering
notations too.
- The same syntax can be used within a jazz/pop chord to produce the
familiar "stacked scale degree" notations. So "C6 9" or "C7(b9
b13)" do what one would expect. Slashes can also be used here:
"C6/9".
- Chord symbols placed in a bass clef of a grand staff automatically
appear below the staff, not above it.
- The Tahoma font is now used for all chord symbols for increased
clarity in the smaller sized scale degree numbers and accidentals.
Significant Bug Fixes:
- Fixed assorted bugs in MusicXML import/export concerning nested tuplets, chord symbols and anacruses.
- Fixed bug in WAV export that affected Windows Vista.
- Fixed layout problems associated with lyrics in multivoice staves
New Features in Release 1.1
Major:
- Scores can now be exported as MusicXML.
- Add horizontal drag gesture that permits duration to be controlled
directly during mouse note entry, without using the object palette.
- Viola, cello, clarinet, bassoon, oboe and trombone have been added to the instrument
library.
- Improved Page View layout to prevent final systems from containing a single bar by itself.
- Major improvements to layout and editing of multiple voices on a staff
Significant Bug Fixes:
- Fixed problems with duplicate usernames during registration.
- Fixed assorted bugs in MusicXML import.
- Added missing European language characters to sans serif character set.
- Fixed MIDI export to include correct General MIDI instrument patch numbers.
- Chord symbols are now shown in correct transposed pitch during editing, when
in non-concert-pitch mode.
- Improved administrative UI for Learning Edition communities
New Features in Release 1.0
Major:
- Release 1.0 supports all Noteflight Learning Edition features.
- Drag-and-drop editing of individual notes, entire passages and
entire score sections is supported. Any selected notes, staves or
measures may be dragged horizontally to move them to a different
point in time, making editing of rhythmic placement for notes and
melodies much easier. Passages on a single staff may also be
dragged vertically to move them to other staves.
- Noteflight now supports export of MIDI files. These may be optimized for
either musical performance, or for import into another notation
editing program.
- Noteflight now supports export of audio files in the WAV format. These audio files
are identical to the performance of scores played within Noteflight.
- The Noteflight text character set now includes characters for nearly all European languages
including Greek and Cyrillic.
- Many aspects of MusicXML translation have been improved.
- Text in scores may now contain multiple lines.
Significant Bug Fixes:
- Saving after session expiration is now handled by providing popup to log in again.
- Problems with asymmetrical printing margins have been corrected.
- Problems with mangling of transposed chord symbols have been fixed.
New Features in Beta Release 3
Major:
- The new "Import" command allows MusicXML files to be imported into Noteflight, for Flash Player 10 and up.
- Parts for transposing instruments can optionally be displayed and edited in their transposed keys.
- Selected notes and passages can be transposed by named intervals, and enharmonic changes applied.
- Cut/copy/paste work across different documents, including multiple windows open at the same time.
- The new "Save As Copy" command permits a copy of any document to be saved.
- Lyrics may be added to notes, including support for multiple verses.
- Performance instruction text can be added to the score at any note, rest or barline.
- Dynamics or arbitrary expression text can be added at any note/rest. Dynamics affect score playback.
- If one or more staves are selected during playback, only those staves will be heard. This allows one to more clearly hear an individual part.
- Swing eighth notes are supported, with any desired degree of swing.
- Scores are automatically saved during editing to avoid possible loss of work.
Other changes:
- Flexible layout adjustments can be applied to any measure by dragging barlines from side to side.
- The keystrokes ( and ) work identically to [ and ], so that European keyboard layouts have a workable shortcut for rhythm change edits.
- New playback speed adjustment works independently of tempo changes, allows non-authors to vary playback tempo.
- Violin sound added
- Object Editing Palette retains new relative position after being dragged
- Approximately 200K smaller initial download.
- Legacy audio playback mode available for situations where new FP10 Sound APIs do not function optimally
New Features in Beta Release 2.1
- Automatically detects and makes use of Flash Player 10 Sound APIs, enabling steadier and smoother
playback on all platforms.
For more information on other features, please see Noteflight Help
New Features in Beta Release 2
- General improvements to chromatic transposition, including support for chromatic
passage dragging with Shift key.
- Better control of playback cursor during silent passages
- Support for pickup bars
- Show editing palette for changes to score and staff selections.
New Features in Beta Release 1
- Tuplets: triplets, 4-against-3, quintuplets, etc.
- Multiple voices per staff. Divisi parts and 4-part harmony in grand staff are now possible.
- Selection of score and staff ranges by dragging mouse
- Playback starting from any measure by clicking in measure marker
- Auto-scrolling to maintain view of score during playback.
- Draggable chord symbols
System Requirements
Flash Player 10.0.45.2 or greater is the recommended version for
all Noteflight users. You can download the current version of the
player from Adobe by
clicking this
link.
Noteflight is supported on the following operating systems and browsers:
- Firefox 3.5+ (MacOS, Windows, Linux)
- Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (Windows)
- Safari 3 and 4 (MacOS)
- Opera 9 (MacOS, Windows, Linux)
Known issues and limitations
Very large MusicXML scores don't import properly, or at all
We're working on improving Noteflight's ability to handle scores with
many parts or many measures. At the time being, very long scores or scores with
over 20 parts may not import properly from MusicXML.
Some keyboard shortcuts do not work in Internet Explorer
On Internet Explorer for Windows, the Ctrl key is not correctly
detected in combination with certain keys that correspond to browser
menu commands on the File and Edit menus, specifically C (Copy), X
(Cut), V (Paste), S (Save), Y (Redo) and Z (Undo) . As a workaround the
mouse may be used to select the menu items in question.
Only one paper size and format is supported
Only US Letter size paper and portrait orientation is available for printing.