Hi! It’s been a while!

We’ve been quiet recently, but rest assured, we’ve been hard at work. Our efforts have been focused on making the Noteflight editor more stable and easier to use, and the playback engine more expressive. Here are a few highlights!

Augmentation/Diminution for Multi-note Edits

In other words, you can change the duration of a whole bunch of elements all at once, instead of one at a time! This works with the [ and ] keyboard shortcuts, and the duration buttons.

Repeat Playback Enhancements

We’ve continued our campaign to enable Noteflight to play more subtle and complicated repeat structures. Recent updates improve how multiple repeat endings are handled, interactions between segnos and repeat endings, and performance text like “2x” or “3x”.

Dynamics Playback Enhancements

Our playback engine has been souped up to allow for better interactions between crescendos/ritardandos, pedal markings, tremolos, trills, arpeggios, and sustained notes. Noteflight is now more expressive than ever. Listen for yourself!

Respect to poweruser zachlew for this piece.

Lyrics: Copy & Paste, and Underties

You can now copy and paste lines of Lyrics! All of the standard controls for selecting, copying, and pasting score elements now apply to lyrics. This also works for multiple lines.
This update also adds the undertie?charater to lyrics. Use it by typing ~ into the lyrics entry text box.

PDF Imports Beta

For several years, this has been our most requested feature. We are finally taking a stab at it!

Noteflight is working on a feature that will automatically convert your PDFs into Noteflight scores. This new system relies on “Optical Music Recognition”, which uses machine learning to scan images and interpret music visually. This is a difficult task for a computer, and it’s far from perfect. PDFs are essentially just images, and don’t contain musical information the same way MusicXML or MIDI files do.

Also note that this Feature Preview requires a Noteflight Premium account, and is very much a work-in-progress!

CPU & Memory Efficiency

While not necessarily a feature, this is arguably even more important. Over the last couple of months we took a close look under the hood of the Noteflight editor, and were able to make several substantial optimizations. This will significantly improve lag while editing scores and prevent crashes in low-RAM environments.

We hope you like these changes! Sincerely, thank you for sticking with us over the years.
– Matt J
Noteflight Team