Initial experience with Notion

[SteveWest]

Having bought the Notion app for my iPad, and played around with it for a day or two, I thought I'd try it out on a 'real' project. Here's how I got on...

The 'project' that I picked was one of transcribing some music that I already own: a pavan for five viols by Thomas Tomkins, for which I have the parts written out in manuscript form.  I needed to produce a score and thought it would also be helpful to produce typeset parts to replace the manuscripts.

1) Setting up the score

Setting up the score in Notion was very easy: just clicking on each of the instruments to create each of the five  lines. Notion doesn't offer viols as an option, but nor does any other music software that I've used. I settled for two violins, two violas and a cello, to stand in for two trebles, two tenors and a bass viol. The key signature (F) was no problem, nor was the time signature (4/2).

2) Entering the notes

The piano keyboard entry is very good and fast. Note values in the piece ranged from semi quavers (16th notes) to breves. Notion unfortunately doesn't have breves, but tied semi-breves were acceptable. Editing of mistakes was not straightforward and I ended up making corrections mainly by undoing back to the point where I'd made the mistake. Accidentals seem to default to flats and, in some places, I had to change these to sharps, using the palette tool. It would be nice if Notion remembered a preference for sharps, at least for the current bar. It's a bit annoying having to change several D-flats into C-sharps within a single bar. The automatic beaming of notes seemed to give sensible note grouping. Generally, the experience of note entry was very good.

3) Checking my work

Having the score on the iPad, alongside the manuscript, was very helpful for checking. As well as a visual check, I checked with audio playback. Again this worked well, and it was easy to pause the playback whenever a harmony sounded odd, and to check with the original manuscript.

4) Printing the score

This was a point where Notion really disappointed. I produced a PDF, which I then printed. Notion had set out the score with only two (or in some cases one) bars per line and the score looked much too spread out. The piece is only 32 bars long, but stretched to 7 pages. I decided that the best option would be export the file as MusicXML and open this in a another music program for the final print formatting. Initially I had problems with emailing the XML (see a previous post) but, with yesterday's new update of Notion, this worked fine. I used a conversion utility to convert XML to ABC (a free music standard that I use extensively) and then used ABC to reformat the music and print it out.

So, overall, the use of Notion on iPad was very successful, and this software is going to be a really useful addition to the other tools that I use. Right now, it can't completely replace other tools, mainly because of the lack of user control of the formatting of the final printed score. I hope that will be improved in a future update. Nevertheless, this is very good value for the ten quid I paid for it, and turns the iPad into a great notation tool.

Cheers

Steve

[pkx166h]

Hmm..

Here is my experience (note I haven't even tried to print anything out).

1. Crash. Ipad 1 - plenty of GBs of space, crashed 4 times in first 15 minutes of use.
2. Entering notes is painful - the keyboard will reset to C4 when I am trying to enter notes in C5+ Range with no explanation. Please let the user move the keyboard, don't second guess me.
3. Tempo and Time signature. This doesn't appear to be global. While I can see 3/4 staring me in the face, the first two bars of my piece were playing as if it was 4/4 no matter what I tried to do - clear/delete bars and re-enter Tempo. In the end I had to start again. Just make a global setting and make it stick on all staves. Ditto tempo. Most people will have a tempo setting for a whole piece, just assume that. Make it easy to *globally* change this stuff. Often I want playback at faster speed than I will be peforming so I can get an idea of a phrase. This is notation/composing software, let me do that at the speed I want. When I am finished THEN I can export it at the speed I want.
4. Saving files to drop box. Please let me decide if I want to rename my files and assume that if I don't I DO want to overwrite my music file. I don't want dozens of Myfile, Myfile(1), Myfile(2),
5. Dotted rests seem impossible to create. In 3/4 I have to make a 2 + 4 instead of a dotted 2.
6. Assume notation standards, if I list a load of instruments, can't you just put them in the correct order as an orchestra would have to start with. So when I add a new instrument, I don't have to manually move it up and down, so that my third French Horn is in the correct place and not under the cellos.
7. Delay. There is a noticeable delay if you try to type notes in to fast and often I am waiting for catch up or notes are just missed.

I am flighting this software instead of being able to compose with it.

I realise this is an ipad and 'only 10 quid' but compared to music studio and the like this really is not very slick. So compared to those tools this is NOT good value.

While the quality of the sound is good, I want to compose not to oo and aah with someone else's work. 10 quid can buy a lot of paper and pencils.

I'm regretting buying this. Of course I will persevere but I've only just started to trsnscribe my 100+ bar composition and I'm wishing I had stumped up for one of the other music products whose instruments may not be as good but the user interface is much more responsive, lets me do what I want (doesn't secnod guess me) and most importantly, doesn't crash.

I do hope there is an update soon to resolve this.