3 ms·

I suspect the reason that so few -- and such poor -- options exist is that the market is too small.

baddox 16y ago
I don't know. There are many examples of good digital audio workstation applications. Some of them (I'm thinking Cubase) even contain a music notation subsystem. I think the market for an affordable music notation application with a refreshingly usable interface (for the iPad or otherwise) would be sufficient.
dgurney 16y ago
I'm not so sure about that (the initial comment)... there are a lot of musicians out there. Even a casual composer like myself (who only composes every couple weeks when I feel like it) owns a copy of Finale. And almost all of my music-oriented friends do too. Definitely a smaller market than, say, Quicken, but I bet it's still pretty big.
oblique63 16y ago
The market is there, it's just that no one really pays attention to it. The options currently out there are all pricey (for the 'starving artist' types that musicians tend to be anyway), bloated (the latest Guitar Pro has Effects Pedals for crying out loud), and just expect musicians to instinctively know what to do when given nearly half a screenful of buttons. Just the other day I noticed a Sibelius manual at my local bookstore that was the size of a phone book! If you're a songwriter, all you want to do is basically get to the point where you could record a demo of your stuff; the last thing you're gonna want to do, is waste your time going through a huge tome just to write your stuff down. I'm actually working on a startup that's looking to solve this problem, and we're fully confident that good, affordable, and simple yet well-thought-out music notation software is something that musicians everywhere are going to have a huge sigh of relief over. We're even applying to the summer YC session in hopes of accomplishing this faster :) oh, and our url is http://www.tabrat.com http://www.tabrat.com by the way (still only a splash page though).

I don't know. There are many examples of good digital audio workstation applications. Some of them (I'm thinking Cubase) even contain a music notation subsystem. I think the market for an affordable music notation application with a refreshingly usable interface (for the iPad or otherwise) would be sufficient.

dgurney 16y ago

I'm not so sure about that (the initial comment)... there are a lot of musicians out there. Even a casual composer like myself (who only composes every couple weeks when I feel like it) owns a copy of Finale. And almost all of my music-oriented friends do too. Definitely a smaller market than, say, Quicken, but I bet it's still pretty big.

oblique63 16y ago

The market is there, it's just that no one really pays attention to it. The options currently out there are all pricey (for the 'starving artist' types that musicians tend to be anyway), bloated (the latest Guitar Pro has Effects Pedals for crying out loud), and just expect musicians to instinctively know what to do when given nearly half a screenful of buttons. Just the other day I noticed a Sibelius manual at my local bookstore that was the size of a phone book! If you're a songwriter, all you want to do is basically get to the point where you could record a demo of your stuff; the last thing you're gonna want to do, is waste your time going through a huge tome just to write your stuff down. I'm actually working on a startup that's looking to solve this problem, and we're fully confident that good, affordable, and simple yet well-thought-out music notation software is something that musicians everywhere are going to have a huge sigh of relief over. We're even applying to the summer YC session in hopes of accomplishing this faster :) oh, and our url is http://www.tabrat.com http://www.tabrat.com by the way (still only a splash page though).