Unison: Draw Music With Words

3 hours ago, Omicronrg9 said:

I'll go point by point:

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?
 

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). 

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.

 

• 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:  , specially the E tie needed manual edition.

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

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. 

 

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!

 

It's a pleasure for me to continue dialog with you, so let me clarify more things:

1. The language in Unison is very straightforward(intentionally), yes you need to remember certain rules in order to type your music really fast. But you are getting so much in return: you are learning about the structure of any music score: note/chord/unit->voice->stave->measure->page line. The flexibility is ridiculous, you want 10 voices - you can do it. You want crazy cross-measure tuplets, cross-measure beaming groups or cross-stave s-shaped slurs in any form - you get it. Imagine you have a pen and paper, you can draw anything you want, literally. This is what Unison offers.
It's not like you need 10 voices, or any other crazy staff, but if you want to - you just can do it. Because who am I, as a creator of a tool to tell you what you as a musician can or cannot do. Music is art, and there are no restrictions of how you can express yourself. But it does not mean that Music don't obey certain rules, sure it does. But having such flexibility is a bless. Building such flexibility in W1 is a nightmare, but this is what probably holding back music development. If software restricts you in some way, then the whole progress of music slows down.

You need to learn your software anyways, and sometimes those W1 apps have really big difference in how you approach certain tasks. Because UX are completely different in any given W1 app. But people learn new things if they want a change. 

Language that I developed for Unison is extremely plain. You said that you don't mind brackets. And that's the problem, because I can use brackets for let say tuplets, other language creators can use them for beaming groups and etc. In that little moments you need to learn again and again for new languages, which I try to avoid at all costs.

And if you see words like "measure, staff, voice" - there is no way that you would not understand that. Or commands like: "slur on first stave from first unit to third unit". It's just super straight forward. You can read such text and can replicate music score on a paper if you want to. Is it verbose - sure, but there is no way that you as a musician cannot understand it. For me this is the most important factor.

2. About the first example: I tested in many cases this solution, and I would say that in 100% (or close to it) it's a perfect solution.

3. I would also mention why Unison is cooler than LilyPond - navigation system between text and image. I remember back in university when I was typing my diplomas in LaTeX: it's super annoying when I was trying to find certain place in the text to adjust or improve.

In Unison it's super easy by ctrl+left click on text/image:


This is a key feature for the people who is afraid of loosing control over the text they are typing. It also teaches you about the structure of the music.

4. Another feature you mentioned is playback. I will try to build the best sounding for the music score. Although the main idea of Unison is just to render music score, I will still consider this feature as a quite important one.
When you are using any app for playback, you just hear this annoying robotic sound, sure it's okay, better than nothing I guess. But is this the best that we can do?

Well, I will try to be more ambitious. Just by what I've done so far and how much details I worked on, and how many endless hours I spent on something that few people in the world would appreciate or even notice. I've worked on this tool for three years so far. Almost everyday! I am a normal human being who needs make a living, I have a job, bills, duties, etc. But still I managed to create something that I am really proud of.

Not only I am quite unique person in terms of different skills and knowledge which are required to build such app: music, math(yes, tons of it), programming skills (in building UIs, servers, parsers of natural languages, databases, deployments), but also I am an extremely dedicated person. I don't play around. It's not some bull crap I do "for fun".

I don't want to sound pretension, although I am a pretension dude. Well, I feel like I deserve it to behave in this way.

The reason why I am saying all this is quite simple - just to let everybody know, that I will continue working on this tool and make it as good as I can. And I feel I can do it better than many other people/companies. The only skill I am lacking is selling skills and growing community through learning and content creating. But I am just 28, I guess I got time to learn how to do it. And it always requires time and cannot be done overnight.

I always appreciate constructive criticism, this is why I want to thank you once again.