Staffpad - music notation software

[riggi]

I ended up buying this yesterday and overall am quite pleased with it.

The writing recognition is quite good as long as you are fairly legible.

I wish you could lasso select notes and then drag them up and down. moving notes one at a time is quite tedious when you want to transpose a whole phrase/bars.

I can't work out how to set the tempo. I want the playback to be faster/slower, but can't find any tempo setting.

Kind of annoyed that there were no guitars included. I ended up buying the 2 guitars so I could write and have them playback.

I think it will get better with some updates, but it is nice to be able to use the pen to enter in notes.
I think the note entry part is good, but the editing functions are quite limited at the moment. So, if you are just copying some written music, it would be quite fast, but if you are composing and want to try out different ideas, it is not so fast as some of the other mouse based software.

[edit] OK, I worked out that you just need to type a number above a bar to set the tempo (I was originally trying to type "Tempo"). Also worked out that you can select a whole bar by double tapping with your finger and then dragging the notes up or down, but a lasso to select only certain notes would be good.[/edit]

 

[Boblette]

Great to hear Riggi,

What are you using it on? I decided to get the Surface 3 with 4GB RAM instead of the 2GM, seemed silly for the small $100 not to double the RAM esp since now Sibelius is soon to be supporting the Surface Pen and Sib is bound to be a RAM hog.

 

[riggi]

I'm use a SP3 i5 with 8GB RAM.
It also works OK on my Asus Vivotab Note 8 which only has a Baytrail processor and 2GB RAM, so the Surface 3 should have no problems.

One thing I've noticed is that it will randomly crash out to the metro screen. Good thing is that it seems to save everything, so when you go back into the program, I have never lost any notes.

The Staffpad support is very responsive, I emailed them some bugs and questions and they replied in less than an hour, and then replied to my reply just as quickly.

They said there should an update this week to fix the nylon guitar stave amongst other things.

 

[Boblette]

Yes, I agree with you about their support. David has been very helpful.

I am happy to have him driving the development of SP.

I will keep you informed as to how well Sibelius 8 works with the pen hopefully next month.

 

[alerine]

Can I hook my digital piano through a MIDI interface and USB port, play live on my instrument and StaffPad record my notes (music sheet) like Sibelius or Finale? Thank you

 

[alerine]

Not testing Sibelius, but MIDI worked fine for me in StaffPad.

Here is a screenshot of StaffPad performing the Theme from M*A*S*H ("Suicide is Painless), downloaded as MIDI

View attachment 5879

Can you play on the MIDI keyboard and StaffPad record the music and notation you are playing on the fly?

 

[sharpuser]

Can you play on the MIDI keyboard and StaffPad record the music and notation you are playing on the fly?

No, sorry. That would require a MIDI sequencer.

 

[Boblette]

Hi Alerine,

The best way to think of SP and if it is for you is that it is first and formost an electronic manuscript paper pad that has handwriting recognition. If you have use for manuscript paper. You have use for StaffPad. It also has a great playback feature. But there are plenty of ways to playback notated music.

 

[PaulJ333]

As I understand it now, you can't because Microsoft doesn't allow MIDI keyboards (and other devices) to work with Modern UI apps, even though it would be trivial for them to do so.

It would be very desirable to hook up a MIDI keyboard to a Surface (or other Windows) tablet to use with apps like StaffPad, but you can't because those apps have no way to communicate with MIDI devices.

So you you want to do that, you use an iPad, which has long supported MIDI devices.

Or use a desktop app such as Sibelius, which works fine with MIDI devices.

Microsoft, you did a LOT of excellent listening to customers in developing the Surface 3. Please listen here and allow Modern UI apps to use MIDI devices.

 

[balasiv]

Microsoft doesn't allow MIDI keyboards (and other devices) to work with Modern UI apps.
It would be very desirable to hook up a MIDI keyboard to a Surface (or other Windows) tablet to use with apps like StaffPad, but you can't because those apps have no way to communicate with MIDI devices.

Thanks for the feedback. You may be pleased to know that there is a native MIDI API in Windows 10 that allows Modern/Universal Windows Apps to communicate with MIDI devices (and use the internal MIDI synth as a device to play audio). You can find more details on the API here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/windows.devices.midi.aspx

 

[PaulJ333]

EXCELLENT! I was blown off by a program manager who didn't even understand the issue (he thought MIDI was only for playing music on an external synth, so he said, "Everyone is using software synths now") a couple of years ago when I suggested this.

I'm SO GLAD that Microsoft is REALLY LISTENING now! THANKS!!!!