Leading music companies leverage Noteflight’s Publishing Server to deliver interactive scores to mobile devices
March 5, 2012 Cambridge, MA — Noteflight, LLC (noteflight.com), developer of innovative online music notation software, today announced the release of Noteflight Publishing Service, a cloud-based server platform that manages digital sheet music assets and delivers interactive musical content to tablets, smartphones, HTML5 browsers and the Noteflight Score Editor. The service is aimed at publishers, institutions and distributors of sheet music, and is available for use under a variety of flexible licensing arrangements.
Noteflight Publishing Service (NPS) is a cloud-based service which converts digital music files into graphics and audio on the server side, using Noteflight’s music layout engine. NPS then delivers the results to authorized users, formatted on the fly according to their needs. It harnesses the advantage of the computing cloud, freeing content owners from the need to manage their musical assets and generate them in a huge variety of file formats. Scores may be provided as MusicXML files or sourced from Noteflight’s innovative online score editing website Noteflight.com.
Most other digital sheet music systems work by magnifying or shrinking the original printed pages of a score to fit a device’s screen, which results in music that is hard to read and play along with on a tablet or a web browser. In contrast, NPS automatically lays out a score’s notes, measures and staves in a way that is sized and formatted for any application — whether on a smartphone, a tablet, or a large screen. NPS can also provide sheet music in the best data format for viewing on each major platform, whether it’s HTML5 open standards or a native iOS/Android app. Audio, images and PDF assets can also be managed and delivered along with the scores.
NPS integrates cleanly with systems that control access to a musical score, such as sheet music e-commerce sites. An authorized party can create a signed token using standard public-key cryptography, allowing access for a limited period of time to any score stored on NPS. This token is verified by NPS before the score is provided to an end user. Thus, sheet music merchants and copyright holders need only concern themselves with generating tokens; no particular commercial model is imposed by NPS.
As a standout example, Yamaha’s newly released iPad sheet music reader app NoteStar uses NPS to deliver high-quality interactive digital sheet music sourced from leading publishers Hal Leonard Corporation and Music Sales Ltd. NPS addressed Yamaha’s need for thousands of scores to be immediately available within the app in any note size, key or screen orientation, with the shopping experience managed entirely inside Yamaha’s existing web store.
“Noteflight’s vision for digital sheet music, combined with their world class Noteflight Publishing Service solution, made Noteflight an obvious technology partner for Yamaha, enabling our app NoteStar to deliver a truly innovative digital sheet music experience to our customers,” said Gary Gregson, Engineering Manager of Yamaha R&D’s Technology Research and Development Group.?
“With Noteflight Publishing Server, we are recognizing that music has moved beyond paper and is being physically consumed in new ways, on new devices,” said Joe Berkovitz, CEO of Noteflight. “Most existing tablet apps today are almost unusable, as they display sheet music PDFs that were designed for music stands, not digital devices. The result simply doesn’t work well. NPS is the first solution that allows anyone distributing sheet music to deliver it in any format that’s needed, on the spot. This makes it a ideal solution for today’s digital sheet music businesses.”
In addition to NPS, Noteflight offers cloud-based music notation software to individuals, K-12 music teachers, university level music educators and has licensed its viewer technology to leading global music companies, including sheet music publishers and digital content distributors.
About Noteflight
Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Noteflight, LLC. is dedicated to reinventing the way people create, share, and use written music. Noteflight allows users to take advantage of the full power of the Web to edit, display, and play back music notation in a standard web browser and is integrated with an online library of musical scores from which anyone can publish, link to, or embed their compositions. Noteflight Publishing Server allows music businesses to manage large, scalable cloud-based repositories of sheet music that can be customized for any device on the fly. For more information, visit noteflight.com.
Noteflight Press Contact: Joe Berkovitz, joe@noteflight.com, (978) 314-6271.