Announcement: Notion Joins the Presonus Family

[Admin]

Notion Joins the PreSonus Family

PreSonus is delighted to announce it has acquired the assets of Notion Music, Inc., a leading developer of music-notation software located in Greensboro, North Carolina. Notion Music’s products include the award-winning Notion 4.0 composition software (Mac/Windows), Notion for iPad, Progression 2.0 guitar-tab editing software (Mac/Windows), and Progression for iPad.

“We will, of course, continue to develop and sell all of Notion Music’s current products,” observes PreSonus CEO Jim Mack. “Notion is a strategic part of our increased commitment to the education market, and the current Notion team will continue to work on the products. At the same time, there are powerful natural synergies between Notion and our Studio One, so it’s reasonable to expect that all PreSonus customers will see additional benefits from this acquisition in the future.”

-Admin

[DanteUruzu]

This is GREAT! I love both Notion and Studio One! Looking forward to seeing how the integrate with one another in the future! Congratulations!

[billshideler]

I am really stoked by this announcement.........So much so, I purchased Notion 4.0

TW

[Funkybot]

As both a Notion, and Studio One owner, I'm very optimistic about this. Big buy outs often have negative results for users, but I'm thinking that won't be the case here. If anything, it most certainly means Notion integration into Studio One, which is fantastic, and it could also mean more capital for additional Notion development. Might be win-win.

I'm actually surprised that Cakewalk didn't beat Presonus to the punch, but I think that says a lot about the direction Sonar is going (down IMO) versus Studio One.

[Surfwhammy]

I am really stoked by this announcement.........So much so, I purchased Notion 4.0

TW

Excellent!

I purchased PreSonus Studio One 2.6 Producer this week for the same reason, and with the Producer or Professional version of Studio One 2.6, you can have a bit of FUN with ReWire 2 on the Mac, as shown in the following YouTube video I made the other day. And there is a discount promotion at the PreSonus online store for Studio One 2.6 that runs through September 30, 2013, which also is happening at Sweetwater, which is fabulous . . .

[NOTE: This probably works in the Windows universe, as well, but I have no way to verify it, since I do everything on the Mac. When the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) application--in this example Studio One 2.6 Producer--fully supports ReWire 2, it is easy to enhance songs with (a) music notation playing virtual instruments using NOTION 4 and (b) sequencer-based synthesizers and other virtual instruments in Reason 7 (Propellerhead Software), which when combined with real instruments, real singing, and real external MIDI synthesizers maps to being able to do everything in the digital music production, since you also can use advanced AU and VST effects processors (standalone and plug-ins), as well as the virtual festival of Rack Extensions for Reason 7. NOTION 4 can play Reason 7 synthesizers, virtual instruments, and Rack Extensions via NOTION 4 External MIDI staves, and Reason 7 can play VSTi virtual instruments in NOTION 4 via the new Reason 7 External MIDI Interface (EMI) functionality, which for this purpose communicates with NOTION 4 via a "virtual MIDI cable", as it can do with real external MIDI synthesizers if you have an external digital audio and MIDI interface and a real MIDI synthesizer . . . ]

StudioOne 2.6, NOTION 4, Reason 7, ReWire -- YouTube video

Fabulous!

[Rubens]

The idea to have a fully integration between Notion and a DAW in the way the notation will affect directly the DAW in parameters like beat and time changing among others is just fantastic.
In another hand, the expectation to have notation specifics like cross staff notation fore piano, harp, marimba is a little blurry for me. Hope I am wrong!

[kmlandre]

Interesting news!

I'm assuming (hoping) Notion will have additional resources devoted to it, so where would we post feature requests for the next version?

Here or on a yet-to-be-announced ProSonus forum?

Thx,

Kurt M. Landre'
http://www.SoundCloud.com/kmlandre

[DaddyO]

Well, it looks like the future of Notion as a standalone product is in serious jeopardy. I know, I know, they will say otherwise for awhile and pay lipservice to a future that will at some point be superseded by an announcement. We've all been through these things. In the end Presonus bought Notion to incorporate notation into Studio One.

My DAW is Cubase. Looks like it'll be Finale technology that will eventually pull me into it's orbit.

[kmlandre]

I posted this on another forum, but I'm cross-posting it here, too, in hopes that the PreSonus folks might see it..

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I myself am an avid Notion user & fan and do 99% of my composition in notation from start to finish. I've used the notation tools in Cubase and Sonar and always found their workflow to be incredibly slow. I've always felt Finale was good, but it's definitely aimed towards part and score publishing and not quickly sketching out pieces and ideas. Notion absolutely excels at that.

I'm hopeful about the PreSonus buyout in that it's always felt like the Notion dev team was short staffed. This often resulted in features being trimmed from release and they could never really handle a number of legitimate feature requests from some of their power users.

But I'm fearful in that it may be a case where the unique and truly useful aspects of Notion are gutted simply so PreSonus can say "we have notation in StudioOne".

However, in the hopes that someone from PreSonus will actually read this, here's an incomplete laundry list of items that (IMHO) would vastly improve the Notion experience:

1) Freezable VI tracks (I imagine that's probably built into StudioOne) - this would be a huge memory and performance boost

2) Scriptable access to the notes for performance "tuning" - barring that even a simple piano roll would help immensely

3) Automated mixing (currently you have to pipe things out to rewire or rely entirely on dynamics), but that's probably built-in to StudioOne as well

4) Built-in video sync (the current media.vst hack is workable, but limiting)

5) A smaller memory footprint

6) An honest-to-goodness "VSTi" for the native London Symphony samples, so we can use the sounds in other applications (I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who reject Notion simply because they can't use the sounds anywhere else)

And finally, I hope they don't kill the excellent pricing structure. It's currently only $99 ($70 with the current PreSonus discount!). I would expect the price to go up somewhat for the new features a StudioOne integration would offer, but the current $400 price tag for StudioOne "Professional" is completely prohibitive (and too feature-rich for my needs). Unless, of course, all the current Notion functionality will be integrated into StudioOne at the "Artist" level, which would be terrific.

I really *would* like them to offer a discount on the Expansion Sounds along with Notion 4, but I can understand why they might decide against that. It would be great if they included them all as standard in the next release, otherwise.

Kurt M. Landre'
http://www.SoundCloud.com/kmlandre

[klushund]

My DAW is Cubase. Looks like it'll be Finale technology that will eventually pull me into it's orbit.

Seems like Steinberg is working on something new. See the "Making Notes" blog.