NOTION 3 "wish list"

[Admin]

Hello all! I was thinking a great way to start the ball rolling with the new forum is to as you all what your "wish list" is for NOTION 3?

Nothing too big...nothing too small!

Let us know.....

[Crescendo]

When can we expect the NOTION 3 version to be released.
It's been quite sometime since the last new release of libraries, etc.

[mkral]

The new forums are a huge improvement, by the way

For the next installment of Notion, I would honestly be happy with 0 new features. I'd rather the program itself was cleaned up a bit.

I spend a good amount of time using the program, I've ran into a few issues. Most of them have been mentioned before. One I haven't seen mentioned: sometimes when you enter a triplet, it places that note correctly, and also craps out a crazy collection of rests into the measure. This typically happens when you attempt to place the triplet in between two other notes. My current work-around for this is to delete everything past the point where I want that triplet and go about my business.

Other things are just basic kinks in the program, laggy/choppy audition playback, crashes, etc. One crash causing bug I've found somewhat recently was trying to Playback a tune, and messing around on the MIDI keyboard at the same time.

Anyways, while I'd be happiest if these things were cleared up, there obviously are some things I'd like added, and once again, most have been mentioned. Top of my list would be Glissandi, and the ability to host other instruments.

[Admin]

Glad you like the new forums I've been trying to complete the "switch" for a while, and hopefully it will facilitate better communication and a larger community of NOTION users.

I can't give you guys an exact date and as soon as I can I will....

I can say that you're going to get both better stability and new features. Once I get the ok...I'll certainly pass on any info.

-Kyle

[frhornplayer]

Well done with the new Forum!!! I can't wait to see what Notion 3 brings!! I've said it before but I am big on Notion's "live applications. I'm doing "Annie" right now... The main features I am hoping for are: performance from a MIDI controller (all performance features - tap, cutoff, cruise, etc), Vamps on the fly, playlists, color options for the screen (make it darker for the pit), and instrument hosting (or at least using Progression as an expansion).

Notion is already an incredibly solid program. These features would put it above an other product in this category!!!

[Unfinished]

I'm surprised to see (on Notion 2) that I have the drum kit on the list of instruments highlighted as if I do have the sounds for it but it's always at the bottom and when I use it (it doesn't say that I don't have it) it has none of the sounds for it. I don't really mind about not having it, but I think you need to make sure Notion 3 highlights only the instruments you have... Basically there's no point in it being highlighted it you don't actually have it. (When I say highlighted I mean the little graphic is coloured in red on the instrument list).

I don't know whether it is possible at the moment but as far as I see it is not easily done: When you select an instrument you don't have, it obviously doesn't have the sounds for it. I haven't checked with other instruments, but with a voice the piano sound is used to indicate how the music for the voice should sound. I think you should be able to choose which instrument sound that you do have plays the part of a sound you don't have and you should choose from a list when you start the score.

Another small thing is that as far as I know, you cannot change the name of a part. It would be useful to double click on the name of an instrument and change the writing to whatever you want, for example changing a voice to the name of the character they may be playing, or changing the name of an instrument to the one you'd want it to be performed on in real life (though you don't have the sounds for it on Notion). By which this would solve the above problem because you could for example create a trumpet part and change the name to a soprano because you want it to be sung in real life and realised on the trumpet in Notion. It might not be widely used but it gives the user more options to customize the score as they want.

I have also noticed that (as far as I have tried) you can do little to cut down the size of the master score. I found that all I could really do was to change the score to landscape in order to cut down the number of pages used. I think it should be fairly easy to have an option which cuts out instruments which are not playing where the composer wants so that little paper is wasted. Surely it makes sense that you should be able to cut down a large score to (for example) just the strings where they play for 16 bars and save paper rather than having 16 bars of all the other instruments blank and useless. I also find it quite annoying that you can't zoom out enough on large scores.

I think it would be useful to have a little information stored in the sound expansion kits and Notion about the instruments it has. By which I mean a small database readily available in the help tab (I'm assuming you don't have this already) which describes the range of each instrument, the types of music it usually features in, how it sounds at different pitches (ie. change in timbre), what the instrument is used for, how the playing techniques are usually used (ie. the mute on a violin is usually used to create a mood of.....), what to avoid, how to harmonise and interact with other sections/instruments, role in different instrumentation setups, what is difficult (ie. large jumps), how the instrument works (so you might appreciate how a double stop on 2 certain notes are difficult). etc.......

One more thing... I've noticed in creating the little attachment that tempo markings and text boxes are latched on unbreakably to bar lines. You can move them up and down and you can move the tempo markings onto different bars but it would really be much more convenient if you could set the tempo on any beat of the bar, which would be most useful when you try and make something sound realistic by slowing down and speeding up within a bar. It would also be useful if text boxes were not latched onto bar lines, only latched onto positions relative to the the nearest bar line below or above once you were not editing its relative position, so it would stay in the same place when the score changes size, for example, but you could change its position to where you want when you want. It's annoying when you create a text box and it sticks to a bar line and you can't move it.

One other thing is about templates. On Notion 2 it gives you a list of instrumentation templates. I think Notion 3 should have a more organised window for templates so you can choose that you want to select a template then rather than a list, it will organise the different combinations of instruments into suitable groups.

I think that's about everything...
It's a bit strange that the smilies have little white edges... looks a little out of place.

[Unfinished]

Would a little database be out of the question? It doesn't seem like too much work to me.

[Screpach]

Hello!
I'm new here, i have demo version 2.0, and i think there must be more languages (like russian, spanish, french).
Also more compatible with finale, sibelius files and others.

And may be you will make portable version of this great program for iphone? this will be real Booom..
Students will can use it on classes when there is not computers.

Thx,
Eugeniu Casimov.

PS. I can traduce this program to russian, spanish, catalan, romanian, ukrainian, and much more...=

[Unfinished]

(Wouldn't that be expensive and under too little demand? Wouldn't it also take up far more memory space and not have enough RAM or something to run properly? - I have a Mac Mini and is occasionally keeps playing or even hesitates when what is being played is too busy).

Anyway I have a few more small improvements to suggest:
Firstly, there are a few annoyances with the method of deletion. It would be much more convenient to be able to select a passage and press delete once to delete the selected notes.
When you have a time signature and a new tempo on the same bar line, you simply cannot (in my experience) delete the new tempo without deleting the time signature on the top stave or whichever is just below the new tempo marking. This could simply be avoided by giving deletion of tempo markings priority to deletion of time signatures, and it doesn't make anything else less convenient as you are far more likely to want to delete the a tempo marking than an individual stave, and if you do want to delete the new time signature of an individual stave, you can easily aim the deletion cursor at the time signature rather than above it.
One other thing is with bar lines. I think it should be made easier to delete bar lines (so turning 2 bars into 1) by doing something like being able to select it and press delete once. It can be a little annoying trying to delete a few spare bars by trying to select the entire area including going over the far bar lines of the area you want to delete, especially when you have to select between a bar line and thee last note of the bar without the being close enough to the note for it to automatically be included in the selection.
Finally, when you have a new tempo marking at the beginning of a page you can only delete it by selecting an area including at least one stave high covering the bar line and using the 'delete special...' option, delete the tempo marking(s). You cannot use the deletion cursor thing by pressing backspace and aiming it at the tempo marking.
One last point about the deletion cursor is that it locks on to the line which you start deleting at, which I'm sure is intentional, because usually you have to let it scroll back along that line until it reaches the point where it deletes what you want it to. It's a good feature in that it means you don't delete what you want to, but sometimes you miss the exact line you want to target and it's a little annoying going back and aiming at the right line again, especially if you have squashed chords. I don't think that the solution is to let the deletion tool roam freely in synch with the mouse, but I think it should be able to be nudged up or down a line one at a time when encourages by the mouse forward or backward movement.

Secondly, the 'fill with rests' tool is quite handy, but I think there should be 2 more options along with the 2 you have already: You should be able to fill with rests the bars which are incomplete but not the bars which are empty. This is useful if you are dealing with a score with an irregular time signature and your scoring leads to you wanting to make single hits which are not held or rolled so it makes no difference about filling the rest of the bar, yet you don't want rests making everything look even more complicated, so this tool would be useful. You have a version of it already which does this but also fills empty bars, which I think most people don't want. Secondly, I think there should be a tool to unfill all measures full of rests. I think it would just be useful to clear stuff out a little if you've filled in measures with only rests, manually or using a fill with rests tool.

Thirdly, I find it particularly annoying that on instruments which can handle more than one note at a time (those instruments which would find this useful being harp, piano mallet (and some tuned) percussion, strings (double/triple-stopping), and celeste) - cannot separate a melody or more significant phrase from an accompaniment or harmonies which they are also playing. The harp, for example, will commonly perform the role of playing a melody as well as chords and perhaps a bass line underneath, yet all of this is governed by one dynamic. What I propose is that there is a tool introduced which allows the composer to make Notion realise his score better than otherwise. This tool would involve pressing a shortcut key or clicking on the name of the tool in the tools window and clicking on the notes which they want to be played louder or quieter than the dynamic listed, like in the actual dynamic level which you can change despite the viewed dynamic level (p-, p+, mf-, mf+ etc.) only at a smaller scale.
The tool itself would be a way of taking the melody and making it stand out more than the accompaniment played by the same instrument. The options it would provide would be to slightly increase the dynamic (ie. f+) or decrease the dynamic (ie. f-) of (a) particular note(s) of a more significant phrase of music where less significant notes are also played on the same instrument and are therefore otherwise governed by the same dynamic marking. How this tool would do that is (when selected and within the score) highlight the note nearest to the mouse and when clicked would make that note be played a little louder or quieter than the dynamic it is read to be at depending on whether the tool was selected as increasing the dynamic level of selected notes or decreasing it (ie. by pressing the keyboard shortcut an odd number of times (1/3/5-) or an even -but clearly not including 0- number of times (2/4/6-)).
What you would need to do then is to be able, as with hidden items, to reveal which notes are made to be louder and which to be quieter and which not affected by clicking a button (and again to return to normal). You would also need to be able to use the 'Clear Special...' tool to delete specifically the unseen highlights which tweak the performance dynamic from the notes, restoring them to plain and normal as you can only do at the moment. To make it easier to select a whole passage and highlight them (these highlights would be unseen unless the button mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph were pressed) so you could select the appropriate notes quicker than highlighting them individually. I think that's all the loose ends tied up about this proposition, though I'm not certain whether I said all of what I was thinking of concerning it...
Anyway, (I hope you understand this idea as clearly as I do) this tool would be very useful in separating the melody and less significant notes from each other even when they are played by one instrument and would allow much finer tuning to a score's performance which makes all the difference where a composer has invested a little effort into showing Notion what they want.

There is a suggestion I want to make involving the selection of notes by holding shift down as you click the notes:
When you select notes in this way you cannot right click or do anything to edit them. I think it would be useful to be able to do this and edit the selected notes through right clicking and clicking on your task as well as deleting the selected notes by shift-selecting them and pressing delete once or right-click+'Delete'. This could be useful for so many things, mainly when you have a few notes separated by other notes which you do not want to change so you cannot select alone and would like to edit or delete them.

Two more small improvements are to do with the copy/cut + pasting process:
When you copy or cut a phrase into another instrument's part, sometimes some of the notes are out of range. This presents you with an option to move them into the nearest octave within range or to leave as is. Another problem is when all of the notes are out of range and again the two options are presented. What this results in is your phrase of music either far out of range, some of it out of range, or your part within range but sprawled across the range of the instrument because the lower notes are within range and the upper notes within range. The common desire is to move the phrase of music into the instrument, treating the phrase as a block and therefore respecting its intervals, which means the phrase of music is transposed into the nearest octave which is within range for all of the notes. Basically what I am asking for is that when you transpose a phrase of music which is completely or partially out of range, you are presented with a third option to move the pasted phrase into the nearest octave which accommodates the entire phrase and respecting its intervals. If the highest and lowest note are not within range at any octave, in other words the range of the pasted phrase is larger than the range of the involved instrument, then this the initial two options be presented again for those notes to either move them into range or leave as is. It's just much easier than saying leave as is and selecting the pasted phrase, right click > Transpose... > up/down x octaves.
The second small improvement is with the command+v shortcut. I have found that I use paste replace far more than paste insert (command+v) so I think it would be better that either you are presented with the option to paste insert or paste replace which you press command+v or you just switch the action to replacing rather than inserting.

I also think you should include the fp dynamic and find a way to record sliding notes on the (bass) trombone.

Finally I think it would be convenient for Notion to play the notes select when you select them (individually/chords) by pressing the right/left arrow key as you move along the part of music. What happens now is that when you click on a note, it highlights in green and plays that note. When you press the right arrow key onto the next note, it doesn't play the note, but it does if you press the up or down arrow key (where it will play the note you change it to). I think a small new feature should be to be able to have selected a note with the mouse, have it highlight in green and play that note (as it does at the moment) and then when you press the right arrow key it moves on to the next note/chord/rest which it will play. Similarly with the left arrow key it will move onto the previous note/chord/rest and play it. This would be useful for composing a passage and checking that it is the notes you want rather than having to play through it. It's much quicker and is just another tiny thing that would make me (and I expect all your other customers) just a little bit happier, and I'm sure it's not too much work.

Hopefully all that is understandable. Thank you.

I also apologize if I'm making too many suggestions. I thought I'd present as many small things (and a few slightly larger things) seeing as you are willing to take on improvements. Any other time I'd expect you'd be far less likely to implement these things because you'd have to make a download or something and a lot of these things are quite small anyway.

[frhornplayer]

I would love to be able to add articulations for groups of notes at the same time like in progression. That would save so much time!!