About - Noteflight Music Notation Software

Noteflight, LLC is located in Boston, Massachusetts, and is dedicated to reinventing the way that people create, share, teach, buy and sell written music. Our product doesn't merely improve on other music notation software: it lets written music take advantage of the full power of the web as we know it today. Noteflight is a powerful full-featured application to edit, display and play back music notation in a standard web browser, integrated in an online library of musical scores that anyone can publish, link to, or embed.

In 2007 we looked at where notation software was, and saw that applications for writing music were stuck in the past. We wanted to accomplish a few important goals:

Make it easy to create and share written music online. People who make music -- amateurs and professionals, students and teachers -- want to share that music with others, sooner or later. But most software for working with notated music treats the Internet as an afterthought: it's geared to saving your music on your own computer's hard disk, not to sharing your music with other people. It's painful to share musical scores online today, and as software inventors, we knew how much better it could be. People expect to be able to do their creative work wherever they go, and a crop of new browser-based applications make it incredibly easy to create and publish word-processing documents or spreadsheets online. We feel musical documents should be just as accessible.

Empower developers to build a new world of musical and educational applications. Applications today should be not only powerful tools, but building blocks that can be combined in ways that their creators have never foreseen. A truly powerful musical application should be extensible without having to open it up and change the code. Adding new instruments and symbols, or embedding in a page and building new kinds of connections with other content -- all of these things should be possible. A great tool lets creative people not only use its built-in capabilities, but extend them and freely reorganize them in new ways. As Bertrand Meyer, a pioneer of software thinking, once put it: "Real systems have no top".

Encourage a vibrant community of users by keeping the basics free. Music notation software vendors continue to charge high prices for boxed software, CD and DVD distribution media, and printed manuals. Then once you buy something, you're basically stuck with it until the next major upgrade cycle comes around, at which point you pay again. All this for the ability to do something very fundamental: to work with notated music on a computer. In this era, basic software shouldn't cost that much either to produce or to use, and improvements should be available constantly, not on a yearly basis. A healthy, large, diverse community of users creates the most value for the world and for our business.

From these observations flowed a set of clear directions: Put a repository of musical information on the web, along with tools to create it, publish to it, read it, listen to it, and search it. Give those tools a user interface that's drop-dead simple, hooked up to features that are powerful. Allow musical scores to be linked to and bookmarked just like any other web pages. Allow music to be embedded in anyone's web documents, like any image or video, and controlled with JavaScript. Gather music from people across the globe, and give it back to them whenever and wherever they need it. And provide all this at no cost for a basic level of service, with premium services and add-ons for those who want and need them.

That's what Noteflight is about.