How many times have we learned how to write music on a digital score?
And how many times have we forgotten how to do it?
How do we write rests? And the augmentation dot?
How do I enter a new key? And the metronomic indications?
How do you write the quatrains of semiquavers? What about the other irregular groups?!?
Who will I ask to teach me this ONCE AGAIN????
Questions like these are often asked by many musicians who find themselves having to write something, whether it is a complex score or a simple melodic line, for themselves or their students, out of the blue. So all those musicians who are not professional composers, but who only use word processing software from time to time.
These softwares are complete and professional, but not very intuitive.
They require a quite extensive learning phase.
Once you have finished your occasional job, you may not have to write music on the computer for one, two weeks or even months.
Then, all of a sudden, you need to transcribe something again. At that moment, when we reopen the music notation software, will we remember how to insert the dynamics? The keys? The choruses? The lyrics? The polyphony? Regular groups?
From these questions, from this awareness, a path of research and development began that has led, today, to the birth of ODLA.
But let’s take a step back…
As an alternative to professional commercial programs such as Finale and Sibelius, in 2009 MuseScore was launched for the first time, a notational software that offers all the features of music writing and editing making them, thanks to its open source distribution, accessible to every category of musician.
Over the years, MuseScore has evolved so much that it is getting closer and closer to the performance level of commercial software and, every year, new interesting updates are released, thanks to the work of the large international community of musicians/programmers, who work to improve its performance.
The ODLA team is fully involved in this work, sharing the same goal with the MuseScore community: to make notational writing accessible to everyone.
In the design of the device we started thinking about the needs of musicians, who too often find music writing software not very intuitive.
In order to learn how to use them with ease, it takes too long a learning phase, which will certainly be very easy for professional composers, who are accustomed to dealing with this software on daily basis. For those who work with it less frequently, it’s a big challenge: music teachers, students, amateurs and enthusiasts, all categories who don’t write music on the computer every day and who need it to be simple, intuitive and immediate.
ODLA meets these needs for the above categories.
Once connected to the computer, MuseScore will open automatically and you can immediately write.
The device makes it easy to access all the main music writing and editing features, and if that’s not enough for the more experienced, all the more complex and less frequent options are always available in the notation software menus, including export to MusicXML to move your work from one piece of software to another.
