Noteflight: Basic Online Music Notation

I was very excited when I first heard about Noteflight, a site supposedly providing online music notation. The capabilities were not exactly what I expected, but I found a useful tool that could become a key ingredient to a teacher's online toolbox.

From their website, here are the three key goals of Noteflight:

• Make it easy to create and share written music online.
• Empower developers to build a new world of musical and educational applications.
• Encourage a vibrant community of users by keeping the basics free.

I thought I would put it up to the test with my notation program of choice, Finale, but I used something simple and quick as the test: a basic two-handed arrangement of "Mary Had a Little Lamb".

In Finale, it took me about 3 minutes to create a finished part -- Noteworthy, even without the use of my keyboard, only took five minutes. I have to say, I like the finished product from Noteflight -- it's solid, and while the margins are a bit wacky, it reads very clean and clear. Check it out below beside the Finale version:

Finale version	Noteflight version

With all it's good looks, however, it doesn't do much good if you can't put in what you want. The capabilities are fairly limited, the playback doesn't support swing, and the interface is not particularly intuitive -- mainly because many of the capabilities are not available via the menus provided. You also can't get your music out of Noteflight and back into your notation program or sequencer of choice. If it could import and export MIDI format files, this might become a very valuable tool for serious composers, but with the limitations of the notation, only a fairly basic leadsheet, single line, duet or piano arrangement will work well with this system -- otherwise you are probably looking at a fair amount of time putting your music into Noteflight. I think the most promise comes from educational applications -- practice exercises for beginning piano students or scale and arpeggio studies, for example. I can see the potential of using this much more as a teacher -- to disseminate new music to work on -- rather than distribute music to people for a rehearsal or recording. If you are interested in spreading the word about your original compositions, then Noteflight might be a good place to getting your work in the hands of teachers or professionals that may actually use it. Stroll by Noteflight to take a look at the future of online notation -- and don't forget this site is still in "beta", so there's much more to come than what is offered as of this writing.