Scoring Notes

Daniel Spreadbury returns to the podcast to go behind the scenes into the making of Dorico for iPad. Daniel is the product’s marketing manager at Steinberg, and he takes Philip Rothman and David MacDonald through the process of developing this new version of Dorico. We go through everything from the technical details all the way up to the user experience, and Daniel recalls the crucial decisions a...

We recap the wild and exciting week we’ve just had in the world of music notation software, with not one, but two major products debuting on iPad. Within the span of 24 hours, both Steinberg and Avid released versions of Dorico and Sibelius, respectively, for Apple’s tablet platform, taking many users by surprise and reimagining what it means to use these powerful music tools. First, Dorico expert...

Katie Wardrobe is the founder and director of Midnight Music, a thriving service which helps music educators integrate technology into their teaching. Katie provides workshops, presentations, online training courses and ebooks for her community, and on our show she tells us all about how she uses music notation software and many other tools to achieve results. Katie shares with us her surprisingly...

In music scores, a house style is the collection of dozens or hundreds of rules and preferences governing the look of the music — everything from note spacing algorithms, to font choices, to the thickness of lines, and lots more. Philip Rothman and David MacDonald discuss why these elements matter in the course of preparing a piece of music and talk about which types of text fonts pair well with m...

We talk all about that fundamental task that is essential to using music notation software: getting the notes into the program in the first place! There are actually lots of ways in, and it’s worth knowing about them all so that you can use the best method depending on the situation. If you like to point-and-click your way around a staff, try the keyboard — and we mean both the computer and musica...

When preparing music, you always make sure what goes on the page is pitch-perfect. How about what goes on the bill? Should you charge hourly? By the bar? Some other way? Philip Rothman and David MacDonald break down the all the elements of a successful music preparation gig, from the initial conversations with the client, how to formulate the best approach to pricing the job, and finally, making s...

It’s fair to say that the concept of music notation software is easy to understand. You write music on a computer, it shows up on your display, and you print it out. What could be so difficult about that? Well, as we all know, plenty. Philip Rothman and David MacDonald remember beginning with zero knowledge about programs like Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico, and eventually progressing to the point w...

Jason Loffredo returns to Scoring Notes to talk to Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to review Finale version 27, the latest release of MakeMusic’s flagship music notation software. Headlining the new features in v27 are deep support for the two open standards championed by the W3C Music Notation Community Group: Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL), and MusicXML. Tighter SmartMusic integration, pl...

Jason Wick joins David MacDonald and Philip Rothman to talk all about the upcoming release of Finale version 27. Jason is MakeMusic’s senior manager for Finale, and he gives us an inside look into its development, the planning process, how new features are considered, and how they’re eventually incorporated into the software that we use. We hear about the brand-new support for the Standard Music F...

You want it when? That’s often the first question to ask when taking on a new assignment — and depending on how it’s asked and answered, it could make or break a project. Today, John Hinchey joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to help us take the stress out of working on a deadline, and make the end result better for everyone. We discuss strategies for breaking a project into its component pa...

Sponsored by Newzik Have you ever wanted to export audio from your favorite music notation software, seen the terms “sample rate”, “bit depth”, and “bit rate”, and wondered what each of them really mean? David MacDonald and Philip Rothman sort out each of those terms to help us understand why they’re important, how they came about in the first place, and, most importantly, how they affect the qual...

Sponsored by Newzik Philip Rothman and David MacDonald talk all about the developments in MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico that have taken place over the past year, and compare each of them in a special presentation that was recorded live at the 2021 MOLA Conference . MOLA , formerly known as the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association, and now known as An Association of Music Performance L...

Daniel Ray returns to Scoring Notes to talk with Philip Rothman and David MacDonald about Muse Group. Daniel is the head of strategy for Muse Group , the company that originally started with Ultimate Guitar and later acquired MuseScore, the free and open source music notation software. Most recently, Muse Group acquired two more products: the widely-used audio editing software Audacity, and StaffP...

You gotta get organized… with music notation files. To help, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald first cover the various types of backup options, how each method works, and why you would need more than one type of file backup system. Then, we discuss how to manage files when the music changes, how to keep consistency in the file naming process, and to indicate the presence of a new version within t...

Subscriptions are a fact of life. In return for making an ongoing, regular payment, we get something of value. But that’s also true when we make a one-time payment. Software is sold both ways. So when we pay for music notation software, which method is better for the people that use it, and which method is better for the people that make it? Can there be a way to provide software so that works for...

Dave Metzger joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald for the second part of a two-part interview. Dave is one of Hollywood and Broadway’s most accomplished orchestrators and arrangers, and if you haven’t heard the first part of our conversation, definitely check it out to learn more about his career path and approach to orchestration. In today’s discussion, we learn more about Dave’s work on Froz...

Dave Metzger joins Scoring Notes for the first of a two-part interview. Dave is one of Hollywood and Broadway’s most accomplished orchestrators and arrangers, having worked on hundreds of top projects that anyone will instantly recognize, including smash Disney hits like Frozen and The Lion King. Fortunately for us, Dave has always had a deep interest in music technology, and his state-of-the-art...

If you’re a longtime user of music notation software, perhaps you’ve waxed nostalgic for the old Finale manuals, which came as a set of three bound books, or maybe you have a soft spot for the legendary Sibelius Reference, with its inimitable mix of wit and wisdom. Whether you give it a fleeting glance or you’ve eagerly read every last word, documentation is a vital component of music notation sof...

Justin Tokke joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to introduce the Well-Tempered Consort, a fully flexible and customizable way of configuring Bach’s masterpiece for any ensemble. Justin arranged the entire project, edited all of the parts, and is the Technical Lead for Carl Fischer Music, which is publishing the entire collection for anyone to configure and download to suit a wide variety of...

If you use Sibelius or Finale, you’ve likely encountered plug-ins, maybe without even realizing it. Plug-ins are small computer programs that run within the software that can look at the score and transform it nearly instantly. Plug-ins have access to a wide variety of settings, and they make it possible to automate tedious tasks correctly and consistently. Sibelius ships with dozens of plug-ins,...

When you work with music notation software, sometimes the greatest challenge is knowing what a task is actually called and where to find it. Plus, if you use more than one program, the same item might be implemented in different ways. In this episode, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald go on a scavenger hunt to find useful features in Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico. We’ll uncover some hidden and not...

If you’ve ever needed to open a Finale file in Sibelius, or a scan music in SmartScore and bring it into Dorico, or write something in StaffPad and upload it to MuseScore.com, you’ve relied on MusicXML to make it happen. MusicXML is the standard interchange format for music notation applications, and it’s what makes such robust interoperability possible between hundreds of programs. We might take...

Millions of people sing from church hymnals each week, and that means millions of people are looking at music notation all the time. Getting those notes onto the page in a form that is both flexible enough to suit the needs of a particular congregation, and yet have lasting permanence for generations of churchgoers is the job of our guest, Dan Kreider. Philip Rothman and David MacDonald talk with...

We nerd out about the latest updates to Dorico and Sibelius. On the Dorico side, we see support for M1 Apple Silicon Macs for the first time. On the Sibelius side, we get an improved task bar called Command Search , along with new scripting and plug-in features that make it easier to automate hundreds of items with a single keystroke. These updates may be technical in nature, but never fear — that...

When preparing music, you always make sure what goes on the page is pitch-perfect. How about what goes on the bill? Should you charge hourly? By the bar? Some other way? Philip Rothman and David MacDonald break down the all the elements of a successful music preparation gig, from the initial conversations with the client, how to formulate the best approach to pricing the job, and finally, making s...