Attention band geeks, comp majors, and idealistic grade school music teachers with ’70s hairstyles everywhere! Get ready to flip-on the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th and rejoice! NoteFlight, a flash-based service for composing, editing and sharing musical scores online -- which is also, I might add, free to use if you sign up for the beta version -- is here to spruce up that lonely ivory tower of yours. No Faustian pact with the devil required!
Once you've registered for that free account, you can truly let your questionably-legitimate esotericism run (relatively) wild! Shame and embarrass the tiresome, life-ruining work of those great, consumptive Romantic composers by dragging notes onto a music staff to create scores, playing them with your computer's keyboard, editing the notes with the click of a mouse, and sharing them with others within the site's database using a simple URL! You can even embed a finished score right onto your cloyingly doting ‘Rachmaninoff Rules!’ fansite if you’d like. Then, wherever fellow geeks, er, devotees encounter your score, they'll be able to play it back as if they were on the main site, even if they don't have an account. This video does an every-good-boy-does-fine kinda job of explaining the site's basic features. All you have to do is sign up, bone up, and wham-bam! You’ll be shitting-out hits like Shubert shit-out lieder.
"Making music is not a solitary pursuit -- nearly everyone who works with music eventually wants to share it," stated NoteFlight founder and presumably fruitless comp. student Joe Berkovitz. "As both software creators and musicians, our team knows how painful it is to share notated music online today. That's because most musical applications treat the Internet as an afterthought: they’re geared to saving your music on your hard disk, not to sharing your music with other people." Software creators and musicians?? Man, these guys probably know how painful a lot of things are!
But seriously folks, NoteFlight plans to launch a paid version of the service eventually, although certain features will always be free to use. Apparently, if you sign up for the beta, you get grandfathered in and won't have to pay later to register. Which is good, because if you’re excited by this product, odds are you’re poor as hell.
