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Unison: Draw Music With Words


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Unison is a platform where you can create sheet music just by describing them with simple words.

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6 hours ago, ComposaBoi said:

It honestly looks like it works just like a professional engraving application but more intuitive and easier to use. The results are worse of course than a professional engraving app though. Interesting nonetheless 

 

I completely disagree that the results are worse. Elements are positioned more precisely, new music sans rounded font matches with the text font. Insane amount of little details, that are not even considered in other apps.

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I'm sure you're familiar with (or heard of) LaTeX. The thing is, people use LaTeX over MS Word primarily because everything just looks nicer (and maths can be handled better). But the average person doesn't need to go through the trouble of essentially learning a coding language, then spend extra time formatting their document, to make minimal gains on the looks of a document.

So my question to you is: What's your target audience? Why would someone use this over Musescore? Because your examples do not look good.

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2 hours ago, muchen_ said:

I'm sure you're familiar with (or heard of) LaTeX. The thing is, people use LaTeX over MS Word primarily because everything just looks nicer (and maths can be handled better). But the average person doesn't need to go through the trouble of essentially learning a coding language, then spend extra time formatting their document, to make minimal gains on the looks of a document.

So my question to you is: What's your target audience? Why would someone use this over Musescore? Because your examples do not look good.

 

It's not a coding language. It does not have brackets, braces or any other special characters. All the command are quite intuitive, so you don't need to learn anything fancy. All the music terms that used in the "natural" language can be understood by any musician.

People use LaTeX over Word because they want consistency in their documents. People learn LaTeX, which is far more difficult to understand that the language I developed.
I really don't hear constructive criticism, only the "examples do not look good". I suspect, you didn't like the font. It's okay, I don't expect everyone to love it. I like it, and many other people as well. Moreover, I am going to add more fonts for Unison. So, it can be a true masterpiece where you can define any music structure you want in readable format.

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  • 2 weeks later...

@guseyn 

I love this.

It's like Lilypond but much easier to use. I can actually see really huge potential for something like this. I think the reason why you are getting negative feedback is because some people are confused on the differences between a music notation software, and an engraver. Music notation editors do have their limitations. A music engraver is more focused on layout and beauty, whereas a music notation software is focused on entering notes, sequencing and playback.

On 10/31/2022 at 11:11 PM, ComposaBoi said:

The results are worse of course than a professional engraving app though.

Have you tried it?

On 10/31/2022 at 11:14 PM, ComposaBoi said:

Lilypond is the first thing that came to mind

This looks much easier to use, and I like how it renders the music as you type your text. With lilypond, you have to compile your code to generate a PDF and that gets really cumbersome.

On 10/30/2022 at 11:41 PM, Thatguy v2.0 said:

It's like writing music with lots of extra steps

Just want to point out that engravers are a different type of software than a music notation editor. They are generally more tedious to use, but focus on output results.

On 11/5/2022 at 4:21 AM, muchen_ said:

Because your examples do not look good.

The examples are beautiful to me. But if you don't like the font, I'm sure @guseyn can create options to update the font to something more modern looking. Don't let the font fool you though, take a look at how the score formatting looks. Your biggest thing to look out for is collision, and spacing.

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@chopin
Thank you for the feedback and the support. Such messages really motivate me work even harder on the project.
I invest a lot of time to reach perfect spacing between notes/units (it's relies golden ratio rule), and of course  I try to avoid any potential collisions in the score.
No doubts that new music fonts will be released in the near future. Right now I am working on a framework that manages different fonts, so hopefully everything will be smooth. 

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@chopin
By the way I finished the first example: 
 

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These are all beautiful examples, and I really love the font honestly. I just want everyone to know that Lilypond, although extensive, has an insane learning curve. Also you have to be somewhat technically savvy to use it and compile the PDFs. It's not that difficult, but it is insanely tedious to use. Unison however looks like a really nice typesetting utility that updates and renders the score for you to help expedite the process.

I'd be curious if your software can score something like Chopin's Ballade in G minor? This is what I call, the viability test. Chopin has some pretty tricky tuplets in that Ballade, and some weird notation towards the end of his score. Of course there are other insanely difficult composers out there like Sorabji, however if it can score Chopin, that is a great start. He's a difficult composer, but not insanely difficult and it is music everyone knows. So I feel he is a great test for viability.

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1 hour ago, guseyn said:

@chopin
By the way I finished the first example: 
 

 

Aside from the font I don’t like, it looks actually pretty good. Two things to note though, the slur going from measure 9 to 10 is extremely unnatural and pretty painful to look at; also, it would be nice to have it so the end barline extended all the way to the end of the page, as is most common in scores. Despite those, I see no other problems. I will most likely not be using this since I have more control and end up getting pretty good results with what I have, but I can definitely see younger composers, arrangers, etc. using this because you wouldn’t need to learn for months enable to get good results.

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1 hour ago, ComposaBoi said:

Btw, when I say good looking professional engraving, I’m talking about the style of Breitkopf & Härtel for example, which this looks nothing like.

@ComposaBoi Just curious, if this could be achieved, would that be a selling point for you personally? I ask because depending on the success of a product I am building, Music Jotter, I could potentially collaborate with @guseyn to help achieve this type of engraving with his software. Music Jotter can very well be tweaked to convert its notation to Unison style. Of course, I have to have discussions with the author of this software to see if we could make that happen, but I am curious to hear your thoughts about this as a potential customer.

My focus with Music Jotter is easy to use, highly accessible and somewhat good looking music that can make for a really great composing experience. But I really care about professional quality output as well. In order to reach the professional level quality that you are talking about though, I would need the help of another individual who is solely focused on researching engraving rules.

Let me know what you both think!

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5 hours ago, ComposaBoi said:

Aside from the font I don’t like, it looks actually pretty good. Two things to note though, the slur going from measure 9 to 10 is extremely unnatural and pretty painful to look at; also, it would be nice to have it so the end barline extended all the way to the end of the page, as is most common in scores. Despite those, I see no other problems. I will most likely not be using this since I have more control and end up getting pretty good results with what I have, but I can definitely see younger composers, arrangers, etc. using this because you wouldn’t need to learn for months enable to get good results.

 

Thanks for the constructive criticism. Yeah, the slur looks little sus. But to be honest, this is something I saw in the original piece, and also was a bit confused, and it was engraved there even worse, so maybe I will come up with some workaround.
I am not sure, what you mean by the extended barline (this is how it was in the original piece)
But anyways, thanks.

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4 hours ago, chopin said:

@ComposaBoi Just curious, if this could be achieved, would that be a selling point for you personally? I ask because depending on the success of a product I am building, Music Jotter, I could potentially collaborate with @guseyn to help achieve this type of engraving with his software. Music Jotter can very well be tweaked to convert its notation to Unison style. Of course, I have to have discussions with the author of this software to see if we could make that happen, but I am curious to hear your thoughts about this as a potential customer.

My focus with Music Jotter is easy to use, highly accessible and somewhat good looking music that can make for a really great composing experience. But I really care about professional quality output as well. In order to reach the professional level quality that you are talking about though, I would need the help of another individual who is solely focused on researching engraving rules.

Let me know what you both think!

 

I am really impressed with your playback feature in Music Jotter and how natural it sounds. This is something I want to achieve with Unison. Did you develop your own tool (library) for that?
The music font that I created for Unison is generated by the code, so technically it's not a font (you cannot use it as otf format). It heavily relies on the strokes (feature of any svg element), so that I can use fewer points to achieve "handwritten" feeling. Also it's easier to develop in this way. And as you may know, it's almost impossible to convert such elements to font format (you need to get rid of strokes). Maybe I will come up with some solutions in the future. But I've tried multiple times and failed to do that.
But I will definitely implement export/import to MusicXML, so that I can have common format with any other popular app.

Another thing I want to mention is that like Music Jotter, Unison can do crazy things with tuplets as well(and not only them). You can use any tuplet (and I mean with any number) and with as many layers you want, like in the example I attached.  

About the ballad. I found it here https://musescore.com/classicman/scores/174214 (let me know if this is the the ballad you meant). And I want to say, that I can achieve that (no doubts) and the output will look more appealing(and I am not talking about the font).  It's a huge piece of music, so it will definitely require some time from me to write it down. Right now I am super busy. But I can write some measures from it, that maybe you're interested/curious the most.

We can discuss collaboration, and how we can help each other not only for developing software, but also maybe creating a podcast and tell our stories and grow the community. 

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5 hours ago, guseyn said:

I am really impressed with your playback feature in Music Jotter and how natural it sounds. This is something I want to achieve with Unison. Did you develop your own tool (library) for that?

I'm hooking Music Jotter with a virtual midi port. I will eventually outsource this part only, to have a virtual midi port created specifically for Music Jotter (at least for the desktop version). As for as the rest of the application, it is all custom coded. I'd love to know what your tech stack is.

5 hours ago, guseyn said:

The music font that I created for Unison is generated by the code, so technically it's not a font (you cannot use it as otf format). It heavily relies on the strokes (feature of any svg element), so that I can use fewer points to achieve "handwritten" feeling. Also it's easier to develop in this way. And as you may know, it's almost impossible to convert such elements to font format (you need to get rid of strokes). Maybe I will come up with some solutions in the future. But I've tried multiple times and failed to do that.

Are you the sole developer or do you work on a team? As for Music Jotter, I use a combination of svg and fonts. Fonts for the noteheads, flags, accidentals, and svg for the beams, stems and measurelines.

5 hours ago, guseyn said:

But I will definitely implement export/import to MusicXML, so that I can have common format with any other popular app.

This is where we can potentially double up efforts and share code. I eventually will have to get to MusicXML but probably one of the last things I do. If we do end up collaborating we can share a few things such as MusicXML and Music Jotter to Unison and Unison to Music Jotter data structures. This way when someone composes in Music Jotter, they can export easily to Unison and vice versa and also have that MusicXML availability.

5 hours ago, guseyn said:

Another thing I want to mention is that like Music Jotter, Unison can do crazy things with tuplets as well(and not only them). You can use any tuplet (and I mean with any number) and with as many layers you want, like in the example I attached.  

Nested tuplets is really cool and something my community is asking for. I haven't coded it in Music Jotter at this time, but let me give you a quick suggestion on your output. Make sure you don't "alternate" the notes when writing in your tuplet. You want them to look natural, and even them out. You are free to use the Music Jotter sandbox to find out what I mean by this.

5 hours ago, guseyn said:

We can discuss collaboration, and how we can help each other not only for developing software, but also maybe creating a podcast and tell our stories and grow the community. 

I have a pretty decent sized network while I was advertising for my Kickstarter, so let me know. I've had a hard time finding anyone who wants to collaborate, I'm not sure if you realize how rare it is to find a programmer / coder / musician in this space. But I'd at least like to get a better understanding of your coding skills and how you got into doing Unison.

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@chopin
Still not sure, what you mean by this: "Make sure you don't "alternate" the notes when writing in your tuplet". I use two voices just to demonstrate that spacing and syncing of notes works perfectly well.
I have some troubles to use web version of MJ on my laptop (I am using just touchpad). I guess we can discuss it in DMs along with other things.

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Your software is nice, a lot of work has been put there and I really find it meritory. I also think it will get its public and that the pricing is affordable. H o w e v e r:

On 11/5/2022 at 11:46 AM, guseyn said:

It's not a coding language. It does not have brackets, braces or any other special characters. All the command are quite intuitive

What is it then? 

 

On 10/31/2022 at 10:05 AM, guseyn said:

Any application provides "extra steps".

But musescore/finale/sibelius allows me to put the note where I want to directly in the language of music used for centuries and understood by people from Japan to USA. I imagine notes and the symbols representing them. E.g: I can do stuff like this in a minute using musescore, including the bar number style and the measure sign change:image.thumb.png.4b85a3c4afe7f1798207841b7e1a279e.png 
I believe there's a more than a reason why engraving directly using a visual interface is obviously more comfortable than writing words specially if the software works generally well and whatever doesn't can be fixed manually without struggling too much. Why is pressing a bunch of button combos harder or more tedious than learning a scripting/coding (or not, somehow) language. Instead of looking for the place there quarter notes are I would need to go to documentation and see how I can put a quarter note inside those nested tuplets. And even with autocompletion I bet I'll be faster putting 10 quarter notes using my mouse than writing them in words.

 

On 11/1/2022 at 10:30 AM, guseyn said:

I completely disagree that the results are worse. Elements are positioned more precisely, new music sans rounded font matches with the text font. Insane amount of little details, that are not even considered in other apps.

More precisely than which software? Finale/Sibelius/Musescore? I can edit spacing there very comfortably using the mouse (or even just the mouse wheel) if I don't like how it looks, it's not hard, really. But I am sure you know your competence well so I will refrain myself of showing the heckton of menus for styling the free software I usually handle has.

But honestly what is this: image.thumb.png.20c74d7a0e61106d908eac8bb5f7ae0c.png
It's not just that I categorically and absolutely disagree with this paragraph here, it's that it's objectively wrong. "Using human language is the best way to do it", are you suggesting or implying that the symbols developed for music engraving aren't "human language"? Who invented and developed them then, aliens?

But sincerely, by far, the most severe logical mistake of this chain of statements is this: you base the supposed extra simplicity this software will give over others on not having dozens of panels (are all of them simultaneously active in your screen in the notation software you used for reference for this comparison BTW?) AND most importantly on knowing English which is NOT an universal language; being optimistic, roughly 1/4 of the world population speaks it. I know lots of musicians that don't know a word on English other than "hello, ok", not to mention people from countries whose language has between 0 and nothing to do with English grammar rules or even alphabet. But hey, there's nothing to worry since there is in fact a language almost every musician understands at different levels of understanding and that it's generally easier to explain than a language used for much more varied purposes than solely transmitting music, and it's the one shown on the first screenshot! That is why, in practice, you have to transform those words (or code) into a readable score. You do not publish the words of unison's language, but the score produced by it.

For a musician, the structure of the score is indeed explicit in it, one doesn't have to look at any "code" to see it, nor to replicate it, nor to copy it. One does not need to translate to commands and sentences (a PC does, but we ain't that). The score that you produce is precisely what you can write, copy, modify, send to someone for review and publish. You don't publish the words, you publish the score that musicians do understand.  

So, now that I made explicit these imo fatal flaws in the reasoning of the motivation paragraph, let me say something good: what I subjectively think that could be the key benefit of your software is the simplification and drastic increase of efficiency and speed on teamwork if it comes with an appropriate converter between MusicXML (or other similar famous formats) and Unison's format/language and vice versa. I see this software could really hasten corrections to already-made scores that could be converted from their notation software to Unison. Apart from that, something could be done to allow people to work in the very same document, making different pages in the score or even different sections simultaneously (this would not be likely for original compositions but for arrangements it would be another story). This is something none or very few software implements, to my knowledge.

I think that's all I had to say, I believe. Looking forward to see how the finished product looks  in any case.

Edited by Omicronrg9
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2 hours ago, Omicronrg9 said:


Your software is nice, a lot of work has been put there and I really find it meritory. I also think it will get its public and that the pricing is affordable. H o w e v e r:

What is it then? 

 

But musescore/finale/sibelius allows me to put the note where I want to directly in the language of music used for centuries and understood by people from Japan to USA. I imagine notes and the symbols representing them. E.g: I can do stuff like this in a minute using musescore, including the bar number style and the measure sign change:image.thumb.png.4b85a3c4afe7f1798207841b7e1a279e.png 
I believe there's a more than a reason why engraving directly using a visual interface is obviously more comfortable than writing words specially if the software works generally well and whatever doesn't can be fixed manually without struggling too much. Why is pressing a bunch of button combos harder or more tedious than learning a scripting/coding (or not, somehow) language. Instead of looking for the place there quarter notes are I would need to go to documentation and see how I can put a quarter note inside those nested tuplets. And even with autocompletion I bet I'll be faster putting 10 quarter notes using my mouse than writing them in words.

 

More precisely than which software? Finale/Sibelius/Musescore? I can edit spacing there very comfortably using the mouse (or even just the mouse wheel) if I don't like how it looks, it's not hard, really. But I am sure you know your competence well so I will refrain myself of showing the heckton of menus for styling the free software I usually handle has.

But honestly what is this: image.thumb.png.20c74d7a0e61106d908eac8bb5f7ae0c.png
It's not just that I categorically and absolutely disagree with this paragraph here, it's that it's objectively wrong. "Using human language is the best way to do it", are you suggesting or implying that the symbols developed for music engraving aren't "human language"? Who invented and developed them then, aliens?

But sincerely, by far, the most severe logical mistake of this chain of statements is this: you base the supposed extra simplicity this software will give over others on not having dozens of panels (are all of them simultaneously active in your screen in the notation software you used for reference for this comparison BTW?) AND most importantly on knowing English which is NOT an universal language; being optimistic, roughly 1/4 of the world population speaks it. I know lots of musicians that don't know a word on English other than "hello, ok", not to mention people from countries whose language has between 0 and nothing to do with English grammar rules or even alphabet. But hey, there's nothing to worry since there is in fact a language almost every musician understands at different levels of understanding and that it's generally easier to explain than a language used for much more varied purposes than solely transmitting music, and it's the one shown on the first screenshot! That is why, in practice, you have to transform those words (or code) into a readable score. You do not publish the words of unison's language, but the score produced by it.

For a musician, the structure of the score is indeed explicit in it, one doesn't have to look at any "code" to see it, nor to replicate it, nor to copy it. One does not need to translate to commands and sentences (a PC does, but we ain't that). The score that you produce is precisely what you can write, copy, modify, send to someone for review and publish. You don't publish the words, you publish the score that musicians do understand.  

So, now that I made explicit these imo fatal flaws in the reasoning of the motivation paragraph, let me say something good: what I subjectively think that could be the key benefit of your software is the simplification and drastic increase of efficiency and speed on teamwork if it comes with an appropriate converter between MusicXML (or other similar famous formats) and Unison's format/language and vice versa. I see this software could really hasten corrections to already-made scores that could be converted from their notation software to Unison. Apart from that, something could be done to allow people to work in the very same document, making different pages in the score or even different sections simultaneously (this would not be likely for original compositions but for arrangements it would be another story). This is something none or very few software implements, to my knowledge.

I think that's all I had to say, I believe. Looking forward to see how the finished product looks  in any case.

 

Wow, thanks for the feedback and compliments to my software. I will try to cover as many things as I can:

1. It's a domain specific language. If you compare syntax in Unison and LilyPond, you will notice that in Unison I tried to avoid all cryptic characters, symbols and terms that potentially can be misunderstood. All the keys words in Unison are accepted musical terms. The idea was that if you get the text written in Unison DSL, then just by looking at it, you can easily reproduce the music score with pen and paper (or digitally).
2. So, there are indeed two types of music score editors: WYSIWYG(What You See is What You Get) and WYSIWYM(What You See is What You Mean). If you prefer first type, it's okay. In ideal world they should work perfectly, but let's be honest - most (maybe even all) of them have problems with UX. It's not like end of the world, but sometimes it's just super annoying. Maybe you know such YouTube channel, where author describes such problems in many such softwares.

We can argue all day long, but I can just say from my experience it's much easier to use WYSIWYM type of editors, and more importantly it's much easier to develop them. Mostly because you don't need to worry about how to make everything as consistent as possible (for spacing between different elements, etc.)

Of course you need to learn commands, but it's not that difficult, and in a long term you can create scores even faster than using mouse.

And it's not only about speed and efficiency. For me, when I type the structure of my music gives me so much more pleasure, because it gives me feeling that I am writing music.

4. More precisely than any software to be honest. I can give you some examples that I've never seen:
2002903565_ScreenShot2022-11-16at11_33_53PM.thumb.png.450561a4d4b22095e5d7852c2dd714e2.png
Here you can see that stave lines don't intersect sixteenth beams, which allows to increase readability.

1657795113_ScreenShot2022-11-16at11_36_31PM.thumb.png.fa8d4c1a4400882504619f23adc4d7ad.png
Or here, we optimize vertical spacing of dots for chords with whole tones.

1414883954_ScreenShot2022-11-18at3_42_51AM.png.3f640ca29d788f8252182542424ca407.png
Stave lines don't intersect text labels, which improves readability

1471761871_ScreenShot2022-11-18at3_45_36AM.png.c39daeb03643d30cfee8c6698f00507c.png
In any other software, such ties for chords with whole tones would look ugly, but here we connect such chords quite nicely

And there are many such examples.

5. By  "Using human language is the best way to do it", I meant that if we are going to use text to engrave music, then it's better to use plain language and avoid special characters.

6.  "knowing English which is NOT an universal language; being optimistic, roughly 1/4 of the world population speaks it." I am aware that there are many other popular languages. But first of all, I am not trying to reach billions of users, for me it's important to create high quality product which is profitable enough to motivate me. This is my ambition. And second of all, I can adapt Unison for other languages as well, but it requires a lot of time as you can imagine.
I understand that music score as itself is a language, but it does not mean that we cannot use the language that we speak and write to digitalize it. We don't have music symbols on the keyboard, maybe someone in the future will invent it, but now we are limited in that sense. 

7. I am planning to add MusicXML export/import, it of course will increase number of scores in Unison, and will increase speed of creating scores. Collaborations for teams of musicians is an interesting idea, that can be implemented in the future.

In general, I would say that Unison is more finished product than you may think, just check it out 🙂 

 

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I just want to point out that @guseyn and I had a conversation offline and I absolutely believe in his product. Due to my experience in this industry and in dealing with various musician communities (the Music Jotter community and the Young Composers community), I believe that implementation is absolutely critical. You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you don't know how to sell it, or if it is too hard to use, it won't matter.

Watch me speak about this here on a live stream...I talk about my mistakes in the past, and the mindset you need to sell a product correctly.

Also, these fine details are incredibly important to me. BUT you risk some people saying "so what?". I've had that happen to me with my product, Music Jotter. But....these details do matter, trust me. It's not about that one little detail you labored over. It's about all of the details that add up to make a good user experience.

Unison has the potential to do really well, but again, like with any product, it has a lot to do with implementation.

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7 hours ago, chopin said:

I just want to point out that @guseyn and I had a conversation offline and I absolutely believe in his product. Due to my experience in this industry and in dealing with various musician communities (the Music Jotter community and the Young Composers community), I believe that implementation is absolutely critical. You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you don't know how to sell it, or if it is too hard to use, it won't matter.

Watch me speak about this here on a live stream...I talk about my mistakes in the past, and the mindset you need to sell a product correctly.

Also, these fine details are incredibly important to me. BUT you risk some people saying "so what?". I've had that happen to me with my product, Music Jotter. But....these details do matter, trust me. It's not about that one little detail you labored over. It's about all of the details that add up to make a good user experience.

Unison has the potential to do really well, but again, like with any product, it has a lot to do with implementation.

 

@chopinyou're absolutely right. Selling skills is something I really need. And I believe that growing community is crucial factor.

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I'll go point by point:

20 hours ago, guseyn said:

1. It's a domain specific language. If you compare syntax in Unison and LilyPond, you will notice that in Unison I tried to avoid all cryptic characters, symbols and terms that potentially can be misunderstood. All the keys words in Unison are accepted musical terms. The idea was that if you get the text written in Unison DSL, then just by looking at it, you can easily reproduce the music score with pen and paper (or digitally).

Okay so a coding language for something specific after all isn't it? I'm sure Unison is easier to understand than LilyPond, I believe this can be seen at first glance either you have experience coding or not right?
 

20 hours ago, guseyn said:

2. So, there are indeed two types of music score editors: WYSIWYG(What You See is What You Get) and WYSIWYM(What You See is What You Mean). If you prefer first type, it's okay. In ideal world they should work perfectly, but let's be honest - most (maybe even all) of them have problems with UX. It's not like end of the world, but sometimes it's just super annoying. Maybe you know such YouTube channel, where author describes such problems in many such softwares.

Let's assume W2 works better than W1 overall. In particular, let's assume that your W2 is better than every W1 out there, in particular, better than the one I use. But it is still an W2 and as you say! I prefer it over W2 because I am literally putting the symbols there. For me (and possibly for many others) this is a great advantage, since we don't have to learn yet another language to write most of what we want. I don't really know that guy but since I don't really use sibelius (I had to use it during a year in a course of musical creativity that was kinda meh, I didn't learn anything, everything was like musescore but kinda worse). Still, I will reiterate that you'll hopefully and most likely get your public because people can share your taste on music score editors and prefer W2 over W1. I must say that the playback feature is essential nowadays —despite some may disagree—, basically because it allows to get a rough grasp of what you've done if you're composing for instruments you don't have (to put an example of how that can be useful). 

20 hours ago, guseyn said:

And it's not only about speed and efficiency. For me, when I type the structure of my music gives me so much more pleasure, because it gives me feeling that I am writing music.

Yeah this is why I prefer W1 over W2, the feeling you get with with W2 is similar to the feeling I get writing with W1. But this is subjective anyway.

 

20 hours ago, guseyn said:

4. More precisely than any software to be honest. I can give you some examples that I've never seen:

• 1st example: good, probably not doable (or not easily doable, perhaps via plugins) in musescore (yet). Useful in certain situations for what you mention but can I decide whether that happens or not? If the answer is yes, then I will say "it's more precise". Otherwise it's an aesthetic choice that may improve readability or not depending where the beam is written. I like the choice in any case.

• 2nd example: good too, seems like a 6 die face, but this is basically the same feature you did show me in the prior example. I would say this would have been a better example.

• 3rd example: same feature but nice to see it applied to other contexts.

• 4th example: also good and this time it's a different feature I guess. You'd need to do some tricks to get a similar result in musescore to get the second group of ties right: image.png.cdb1eceb55be50d07562b1bdbc4cfe6c.png , specially the E tie needed manual edition.

20 hours ago, guseyn said:

5. By  "Using human language is the best way to do it", I meant that if we are going to use text to engrave music, then it's better to use plain language and avoid special characters.

Perhaps, though I'm not against brackets I suppose it is better that way. These are really good examples of your software!
 

20 hours ago, guseyn said:

but it does not mean that we cannot use the language that we speak and write to digitalize it. We don't have music symbols on the keyboard, maybe someone in the future will invent it, but now we are limited in that sense. 

Well most scoring software has plenty of customizable keyboard shortcuts anyway. I mentioned that I might be faster than the average unison user using mouse but I am kinda faster on the keyboard as ABCDEFG literally put a note of the selected duration (via numbers). Adding harmonic intervals on top or under the note you're working on is really easy too, just Alt+Number & Alt+Numpad correspondingly do the work. There're certain functions in which I think the direct interaction with the "visual interface" will be faster and more efficient. However, that doesn't mean I disregard this software, I would consider it a neat addition to my usual way of composing, not just because of the visual improvements (as they should be achievable by the both W1 & W2 approaches) but perhaps for editing certain parts.

Thank you for the detailed reply. 

 

20 hours ago, guseyn said:

7. I am planning to add MusicXML export/import, it of course will increase number of scores in Unison, and will increase speed of creating scores.

I believe this plus a good playback feature, plus other famous audio format export/import function would be really good for the successful diffusion of Unison as a serious and stable competitor against the big brands that nowadays dominate this specific market. A great advantage you have imo is that your software, apart from its features. has an affordable affordable subscription price, though there's not a lifetime license is there? 

Kind regards!

Edited by Omicronrg9
typo
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