As an electronic musicial (http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn) I'll give you some feedback from years of hanging out in a DAW. I'll bring up my perspective on some points others have offered and a few other items primarily related to usability. Note that I've spent a lot of time in a piano roll rather than notation software so my experience is very colored but hopefully this is somewhat useful.
1) The need for instruction others have cited I think is a bit over-stated - I was able to get in and start writing immediately without any introduction.
2) Using social media for login eliminates the barrier to entry for me personally. I was fine signing in. Sure it might be fun to allow an ephemeral experience if people just want to check it out but I wouldn't put that at the top of your backlog.
3) Placing notes.
IMO placing a notes should be a toggle not a draw function. I don't want to select a note and delete it - I want to double click it and have it disappear as you would in pencil mode in a daw. At the same time, I don't want to click a note and then click on the length of the note to change it - I want to drag the selected note's length.
3) If I want to change a notes length, I'm forced to change a group of notes existing at the same time. I'm assuming this is a limitation of the modelling - eg that for each fragment of time, a group of notes exist together. This inherently limits me from producing music. If I want to write a quarter note A and two eigth notes C and then D I have to draw a twice and then tie it - this is a lot of work IMO. Again maybe it's because I'm used to the piano roll in a daw and I haven't worked in notation software as much but I fell like it should behave somewhat similarly - that notes are more of a toggle.
Using ties doesn't seem intuitive - although it lets me span the length of a single note, maybe you could have a tool that treats notes like a grid and lets me click a noted and drag it in the grid - vertically for pitch and horizontally for length.
Just some ideas based on things that I found where a bit difficult for me to get done having a quick trip through.
It's cool though - thanks for making this. I'd consider laying ideas out here on the go.
Hello there!
Thank you for your message.
I think that in the future, we will add more freedom to the edition, to get to something close to what you describe. For instance, we would have an abstract way of handling note duration, that would then be translated to one or many tied notes.
As someone who has used both a DAW and musical notation software in the past, it must be mentioned that they are two completely different paradigms. This product is designed for writing musical notation. A DAW is designed for manipulating the arrangement of samples in a multitrack timeline.
That's a very narrow description of a DAW. OP was specifically talking about the piano roll - a feature that obviously differs from traditional notation but is still very much related since both aim to achieve the same goal.
A DAW surely isn't limited to sample-based arrangements. In that light your description of a DAW isn't wrong, but very much unrelated to the point OP was trying to make.
1) The need for instruction others have cited I think is a bit over-stated - I was able to get in and start writing immediately without any introduction.
2) Using social media for login eliminates the barrier to entry for me personally. I was fine signing in. Sure it might be fun to allow an ephemeral experience if people just want to check it out but I wouldn't put that at the top of your backlog.
3) Placing notes. IMO placing a notes should be a toggle not a draw function. I don't want to select a note and delete it - I want to double click it and have it disappear as you would in pencil mode in a daw. At the same time, I don't want to click a note and then click on the length of the note to change it - I want to drag the selected note's length.
3) If I want to change a notes length, I'm forced to change a group of notes existing at the same time. I'm assuming this is a limitation of the modelling - eg that for each fragment of time, a group of notes exist together. This inherently limits me from producing music. If I want to write a quarter note A and two eigth notes C and then D I have to draw a twice and then tie it - this is a lot of work IMO. Again maybe it's because I'm used to the piano roll in a daw and I haven't worked in notation software as much but I fell like it should behave somewhat similarly - that notes are more of a toggle.
Using ties doesn't seem intuitive - although it lets me span the length of a single note, maybe you could have a tool that treats notes like a grid and lets me click a noted and drag it in the grid - vertically for pitch and horizontally for length.
Just some ideas based on things that I found where a bit difficult for me to get done having a quick trip through.
It's cool though - thanks for making this. I'd consider laying ideas out here on the go.