Scoring Notes

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald are back after a short break, and true to form, the conversation drifts from yard work and heat waves before landing on the actual business at hand: it’s time to open the phone lines again. For the third time — after 2023’s three-part marathon and last year’s round — Scoring Notes wants to hear directly from you, on any topic in the world of mus...

Six years after our “ Score preparation and production notes ” episode — Episode No. 2 — essentially launched the podcast, 163 episodes later, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald return to the article that inspired the conversation: David’s score preparation checklist . The principles — respect for performers, readable parts, enough time for page turns — are as true as ever. But a...

What if your notation software could sing? At the top of this episode, we play a short clip, performed entirely in Dorico with NotePerformer handling the orchestra, and a plugin called Cantai rendering the baritone voice. That voice is synthesized directly from the Dorico score with minimal configuration, and it marks the arrival of something the notation world has been waiting for for a long time...

After a stretch away from the mic with NAMM coverage and a few product launches in the interim, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald return for an episode that, as David puts it, is “delightfully very nerdy.” To kick things off, David turns the tables and puts Philip in the interview seat, asking him about two significant sets of releases from Notation Central and NYC Music Services. On...

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. In this interview, we talk with Sam Butler, Avid’s vice president of product management, and Joe Plazak, Sibelius product owner and senior principal software developer at Avid, to reflect on the philosophy behind Sibelius’s recent development approach, how user...

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. In this interview, we talk with Chris Swaffer, senior product manager of software at Fender, about how he thinks about Notion’s current phase in its lifecycle, what the Fender name signals to users today, and how decisions around refinement, continuity, and cros...

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. In this conversation, we speak with Sebastian Murgul, co-founder and CEO of klang.io , to talk about a category that sits just adjacent to music notation — and yet increasingly intersects with it in practical, unavoidable ways: music transcription. Sebastian exp...

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. In this conversation with John Barron, international product specialist at Steinberg, John reflects on Dorico’s current development phase, how its underlying design principles continue to guide day-to-day decisions, and where users should most clearly feel progr...

We’re very pleased to bring you this episode, and more to come in the future, thanks to our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz , a podcast that tells the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. People with perfect or “absolute” pitch hear every single sound as precise musical notes. Is this extraordinary talent a blessing or a curse? In this episode, ou...

‘Tis the season to be thankful for all of the products and services in the world of music notation software and related technology, and for the Scoring Notes audience who tunes in to hear us opine on them! We show our appreciation by bearing good tidings and do a little shopping to find some Black Friday deals and make a few recommendations for fun and productivity. Black Friday 2025 deals f...

We talk a lot about fonts on the Scoring Notes podcast. But there was a time when there were no music fonts. And then, there was one. Cleo Huggins, on the staff of Adobe in 1986, designed Sonata, the very first music font. It’s hard to imagine today, but it was revolutionary at the time, and a leading industry publication called it the “Music Product of the Year”. Sonata provided...

Recent updates abound in Dorico, MuseScore Studio, Sibelius, and across the Apple operating systems. Whether you use all of these products or just one of them, we help you get current with the latest features and improvements, so that you can make the most of the notation software and the operating systems they run on. More from Scoring Notes: Music notation software and macOS Tahoe Dorico 6.1: Se...

Freelancing is a kind of freedom. Freedom from a regular schedule, an office, or a permanent boss. But with freelance work comes responsibility. Part of your job as a freelancer is deciding what the work should be and finding the clients who are going pay you to do it. Not only are you responsible to them, but you’re responsible for yourself, your family, the tax man, and more. In the music...

We open the Scoring Notes mailbag, contemplate the musings of our audience, and try to leave no question unanswered in this fun and informative podcast episode. More from Scoring Notes, referenced in this episode: Finale’s twilight zone: Ensuring a smooth ride into the sunset Using Finale in the unsupported era Leaving Finale behind The rights stuff, with Jim Kendrick Scanning the current OMR land...

Have you ever listened to an episode of the Scoring Notes podcast and wished you could ask a question directly on the show? Two years ago, we opened up the phone lines directly, so to speak, and they were jam-packed! So much so, that we ended up devoting three episodes to answering those burning queries. You can find Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 in the podcast archives. Well, time and technology m...

Hosted by The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the 43rd annual conference of MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians ran from May 30 through June 2, 2025, and brought together music librarians, publishers, vendors, composers, performers, and technology enthusiasts. The 2025 conference was the first one hosted by a university, reflecting the...

Steinberg’s product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury returns to the podcast to discuss Dorico 6 and its bevy of features for music composers and preparers. Daniel talks in-depth with Philip Rothman and David MacDonald about a few of the headline items, especially those that are unique to Dorico. The new proofreading tool continuously scans a project looking for potential pitfalls, and the...

We’re very pleased to bring you this episode, and more to come in the future, thanks to our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz , a podcast that tells the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. From electric guitars to samplers to drum machines and beyond, the music we love is only possible thanks to the technology used to create it. In many ways, the history of po...

If you hear the term “forensic musicologist” and conjure up detectives with fingerprint dusters and a magnifying glass, well, metaphorically you’re not far off. The job of a forensic musicologist is to  apply musical knowledge to questions around copyright, explain  musical facts, and put them into context so that a court can arrive at a decision with the best information availab...

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with John Barron, the international product specialist for Dorico. NAMM offers representatives like John the opportunity to meet with customers from both the notation and audio sides of the music communit...

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with Martin Keary, the head of software for Muse Group. Martin spoke with me about the conversations he had at NAMM about some of the exciting possibilities for MuseScore collaborations and integrations w...

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with Oriol López Calle from My Sheet Music Transcriptions, a service that he founded in 2011 that has since grown to employ dozens of people and serve tens of thousands of customers. Oriol told us about h...

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with Sam Butler, Avid’s director of product management. Sam talked with us about the new decondensing parts feature in Sibelius that Avid previewed at NAMM, and he celebrated the award that his team recei...

This episode was written by Andrew Anderson. We’re very pleased to bring you this episode, and more to come in the future, thanks to our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz , a podcast that tells the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. The history of recorded sound stretches back over a hundred and fifty years, starting with a device that could “record” a voice...

Music scanning technology, or optical music recognition (OMR) if you like, has been around for decades, and yet in many ways is still barely out of infancy. But that could soon change as classic algorithm-based desktop programs converge with newer mobile apps and web-based machine learning tools. Steve Morell joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to discuss his review of six of those products t...