StaffPad Blog

News, thoughts, stories and ideas
Piano Capture magically converts your piano playing to notation
By David William Hearn 26 Sep, 2023
StaffPad has been updated with audio recognition for piano, known as Piano Capture, as well as MIDI input, new Muse Sounds libraries, support for video and more. StaffPad now provides amazing tools for scoring movies.
By David William Hearn 06 Jul, 2022
Summer vibes, timecode, niente hairpins and more!
By David William Hearn 21 Dec, 2021
Audio support, studio effects, open key signatures, new symbols and more!
By David William Hearn 07 May, 2021
One small spring for StaffPad, one giant leap for composers!
By David William Hearn 23 Dec, 2020
What a year! We've got one last update for 2020...
By David William Hearn 21 Oct, 2020
A new season, a new update!
StaffPad and the piano keyboard
By David William Hearn 29 Jun, 2020
In mid February, we launched StaffPad and StaffPad Reader. As I write this follow up, just 16 weeks later, I still can't believe the unprecedented level of change the world has gone through - and is still going through. Wherever you are in the world, I hope that you're safe, healthy and staying positive about the future. I've enjoyed hearing about how StaffPad is being used on projects, both large and small. In 4 short months, I've learned that StaffPad has already been involved in major movie projects, TV shows, live events and album projects. We've received some wonderful reviews and a fantastic community has grown around the app, with Facebook groups and forums to support the growing user base. The current situation has meant we haven't been able to focus on the in-the-room collaboration features offered by the Reader, but we can't wait until we're able to get together again en masse to make music and properly demonstrate the remarkable capabilities of StaffPad and StaffPad Reader working together.
By David William Hearn 02 Feb, 2020
Wow. Well, that was a lot of work! Before we begin , I'd like to thank all of you for your patience over the past couple of years. Developing these massive apps takes a huge amount of time, energy and resources. It's been an incredibly busy time for us, the team has been working around the clock, and we haven't had much time to do anything else. This rebuild was a necessary process; it ensures that StaffPad can move forward well into the future. Today, I'm thrilled to announce a huge update to StaffPad, free for all existing users , and the launch of a totally new free app called StaffPad Reader , for the synchronised, realtime display of parts on multiple devices over Wi-Fi. And, for the first time, we're bringing StaffPad and StaffPad Reader to iPad. This is huge news for us. We heard from thousands of people that they wanted the unique StaffPad experience on iPad. It took some time for the stars to align, but I'm really proud to announce that StaffPad is now also available on the App Store. As you might have guessed, StaffPad requires an Apple Pencil to write music with. Right, there's a lot to talk about. I'll do my best to keep it brief, but be warned - this post might get quite long. I'd recommend grabbing a coffee (and perhaps a croissant 🥐), and settle in to read about what's new in StaffPad!
By David William Hearn 30 Dec, 2019
What is StaffPad? This is actually a great question. StaffPad is a music notation application designed for composers. The "designed for composers" bit is important. There are great notation programs out there, but they're often designed for music copyists, librarians, engravers, music publishers etc. In other words, the core focus of those programs is to provide a hyper-flexible and custom layout for existing music. Those programs have a high degree of flexibility for sure, but they can also be very complex to use. Whilst you're composing, writing and experimenting with ideas, the flow is different; you're focused on the music itself, rather than how it looks on a page. StaffPad was designed from day one to keep that natural flow. It functions almost like a painting app for music. However, StaffPad was also designed for getting stuff done. As a working composer and arranger, I'm often called upon to write large amounts of music quickly; demo it well for producers, directors or collaborators; then record the final result with studio musicians quickly and efficiently. StaffPad has been designed to streamline this process. The music written for these jobs will only be performed a couple of times - as "takes" on the recording session - and will often be changed right up until the final take. StaffPad and StaffPad Reader allow me to navigate the whole process with a speed, fluidity and ease of use that was previously simply not possible. Right. So what is StaffPad Reader? To me, the multi-stage process involved in getting music to musicians always seemed convoluted and technical. As other pipelines (like editing, or visual effects) moved to a non-linear workflow, music notation remained stuck in the past. Once the music is printed out, we may as well be in the 1600s again. The solution to me was clear, but daunting: First, create a notation app for composers that allows you write quickly; handles the demo and layout stages automatically; and leaves you free to change things at any point. Then, create an app for musicians to perform that score; it should wirelessly display and update each musician's part in realtime across an entire orchestra with the tap of a single button, and handle all the layout, page turns and performance aspects automatically. To make this a reality, we have to move to working with responsive, digital scores. Not merely photocopies of paper scores, or static PDF scans or exports of fixed-page notation, but truly dynamic, living scores that can change and update right in front of everyone's eyes. That's where StaffPad Reader comes in. The Reader is for musicians to play your score from. You can have a practically unlimited number of Readers connected to StaffPad in realtime, over a simple WiFi connection. Any changes you make in StaffPad are shown instantly on the Readers. If you press play in StaffPad, all the Readers play too. It'll turn pages smartly, keep everyone in time with a sync'd metronome, count-in and playhead, allow for collaborative annotations and much more. With StaffPad on the conductor's stand, and Readers on the music stands, you can streamline rehearsing, performing and recording with each other like never before. The hope is that with the benefits of StaffPad, and ScoreSync realtime parts, more composers will be introduced to the incredible experience of hearing their work performed with live musicians.
By David William Hearn 23 Jul, 2017
It's been a while since I've updated the blog, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to write a post to let you know that today we've pushed out another minor update to StaffPad, which adds a few features and fixes a few bugs. We also had to do some work in order to ensure StaffPad functions correctly on the upcoming Fall Creator's Update to Windows 10, which will be released later in the year. It's been a while since a major update to StaffPad has happened, but that's not for lack of activity from us on the development side! In fact, StaffPad remains under the heaviest development phase of its post-release lifetime. Despite working around the clock, we're still not quite ready to share with you what we've been up to just yet. What I can share, however, is that we're working on completing the original full vision of what StaffPad should be. The mission with StaffPad was to design a system that would use the latest technology to make it easier to create music . I've always wanted to cover the whole journey, from supporting the composer during the writing phase through to the performance by the musicians. Thus far, we've tackled the composition part of that journey, and now our sights are set on the final destination. In order to realise that vision, StaffPad has had to undergo some serious work, strengthening the foundations and rewriting processes in order to support new and exciting features yet to come. We've added people to the development team and, within the last year, we've written and added almost quarter of a million lines of code to an entirely new codebase. Whilst this new codebase version is not being released yet, I'm hopeful that we'll have more news to share about this and what it brings with it towards the end of the year. For now, let's take a look inside the latest release of StaffPad: As usual, the Windows Store will update StaffPad for you without you needing to do anything, but if you want to double check or force the update early, just open the Windows Store app and choose Downloads and Updates, then Check for updates. To verify you're on the latest version, click the settings icon in StaffPad and make sure you're on v2.4.29.0 Cautionary Accidentals We've added support for automatic cautionary/reminder accidentals in StaffPad scores. Up until now, the app would remove any non-essential accidentals during the printing phase, which could cause some confusion. Now, reminder/cautionary accidentals will be kept in, and automatically enclosed in parentheses () marks to show they're status. The parentheses will only show up if you manually add a cautionary accidental (there's no need to draw the brackets yourself), or import a score via MusicXML or MIDI. By default, StaffPad is quite, erm, cautious with its cautionary accidentals on imported scores. You may wish to remove a few of the more obvious ones from complex imported scores... we'll be improving the smarts of this system in future updates. Per Bar/Per System Bar numbers for printing During the print phase, you can now select to include bar numbers every system (as before); every 2 bars; or every bar. For parts, I rarely choose every bar - but sometimes you might want this if the score is very long or you'll be doing a lot of drop-ins during recording/rehearsal. The Bar Number Staff Whilst it's not always necessary to have bar numbers under every bar for each instrument part, it can be really handy to include in the printed full conductors score for that 'at a glance orientation' - especially if there are a lot of instruments/staffs in the piece! We've included a new category of staff in the Instruments dialog, called Score Tools. Here, you'll find an entry for Bar Numbers, which will create a special type of staff within the score displaying large, boxed bar numbers. You can create as many bar number staffs as you like, and move them around the score order using the move up and move down controls, just as you would for a regular instrument staff. I'll often create two bar number staffs and place them above the strings and brass so I can quickly reference them during a session.
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