Has AI wrought the right way to write a scorewriter?

When Dorico arrived ten years ago, a hot topic around here was whether there was room for a third professional notation program. These days new music apps turn up in our inbox almost daily, and the prospect of asking an AI to build one to your own specifications seems considerably less far-fetched than it did even a year ago. For this Scoring Notes round table, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald are joined by Ben Byram-Wigfield and Jason Loffredo. If it gets easier to build your own tools, what makes it worth paying for a program that somebody else designs and maintains? For one thing, a notation program comes with opinions. Somebody has thought about where the dynamics should go and how much space to leave between staves. We’re glad to spend less time nudging things around the page, though a player with both hands occupied might have an opinion about where the software put the page turn. There’s also the matter of whose software can read your score. Maestro and Denigma Online have given old Finale files a future we wouldn’t have predicted when Finale was discontinued. That gives us plenty to consider about MusicXML and MNX, especially if the number of programs we use to exchange music keeps growing. Even LilyPond, whose text input has long seemed a little forbidding to those of us raised on graphical interfaces, deserves another look. An AI might be quite at home writing those engraving instructions. We’d still like a say in what comes out on the page. What has changed most in your own work since 2016? Let us know in the comments. Products mentioned Notation software Dorico (Steinberg), including the free Dorico SE Sibelius (Avid), including the free Sibelius First MuseScore Studio (Muse Group) Finale (MakeMusic) (discontinued in 2024) Maestro opens Finale’s .mus and .musx files and saves in .musx format. LilyPond (open source) Mentioned in passing: SCORE, Graphire MusicPress, and NoteWorthy Composer File conversion Denigma Online is Robert Patterson’s open-source converter for Finale files. Source code. Extending Finale and Sibelius RGP Lua, Robert Patterson’s Finale plug-in, and the Finale Lua script library TGTools and the Easy Tremolos plug-in (Tobias Giesen) Bob Zawalich’s Sibelius plug-ins Keyboard Maestro (Stairways Software) Playback, recording, and score videos Musio Studio is the digital audio workstation from Cinesamples, the company behind the Musio sample library. Cantai sings the notes and lyrics in a score. NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments) Glisscore makes a score video from a PDF and a recording in the browser. AI tools Claude (Anthropic) ChatGPT (OpenAI) Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Background to the round table Exposition, development, and recapitulation (Philip’s essay on ten years of Dorico and the decade in notation software, October 2026) Q & A(I) and Q & A(gain) (the two 2026 listener mailbags, beginning with the questions about AI) Sight-reading the inbox: 16 music apps on our radar (Philip’s November roundup of new music apps) Maestro, Denigma, and Finale files Maestro opens Finale files without Finale (our first look, October 2026) Maestro: Finale’s next generation? (Ben Byram-Wigfield, October 2026) Denigma Online solves the riddle of opening Finale files — without Finale (Jason Loffredo, August 2026, updated October 21 with support for legacy .mus files back to Finale 1.0) MakeMusic ends development and availability of Finale and Finale’s coda podcast with Jason (August 2024) Leaving Finale behind History and the economics of notation software An interview with Ben Finn, co-founder of Sibelius, part 1 and part 2 (2015, with Finn’s prediction about the professional notation market in part 2) Back to the future of music notation on computers (podcast with Ben Byram-Wigfield, January 2022) and the companion post, A brief history of music notation on computers Muse Group acquires Hal Leonard (December 2023) Free Sibelius First now available (2018) and NAMM 2020: Interview with Daniel Spreadbury on the release of Dorico 3.1 and Dorico SE Engraving, house style, and software design Sibelius 6 is here! (2009, when Magnetic Layout arrived) Dorico is here: A review (2016) and Dorico 1.1 is a major release (2017, when chord symbols arrived) The elements of (house) style (podcast, 2020, on the “tyranny of the default”) Behind “Behind Bars” with Elaine Gould (podcast, July 2023) NAMM 2026: John Barron opens the door to Dorico’s future and the podcast interview with John Barron Plug-ins, scripts, and automation Conquering Finale with Jason Loffredo (podcast, 2021) and the Conquering Finale collection RGP Lua is a powerful plug-in for Finale (2023) Supercharge your Finale workflow on Mac with Keyboard Maestro (2018) Plugged in with Bob Zawalich (podcast, 2021) Playback and score videos Cantai now sings straight from Dorico and Cantai 3.0.0 supports Sibelius Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026) Glisscore turns a PDF and a recording into a score video (October 2026) File formats and archiving NAMM 2018: W3C Music Notation Community Group meets; MNX is next Music Notation Community Group reviews progress; discusses future MNX format (2021) MOLA 2027 heads to San Francisco with Tech Fair 2.0 (where Philip and David will take up the archival questions) Other references Books and forums Christopher W. White, The AI Music Problem: Why Machine Learning Conflicts With Musical Creativity (Routledge, 2025) Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation (Faber Music) Steinberg forums: Dorico File formats and standards MusicXML and MNX (W3C Music Notation Community Group) NIFF, the Notation Interchange File Format (1990s) Publishers discussed in connection with house style Ancient Groove Music (Ben Byram-Wigfield) Bärenreiter, G. Henle Verlag, and Boosey & Hawkes

Opening someone else’s notation file can take a little detective work. So can opening your own file from a year ago. After two 90-minute Q&A episodes, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald return for a (slightly) shorter conversation about figuring out what’s going on in a score before you start changing it. David brings questions from helping his students; Philip brings his experience exchanging files with composers, clients, and colleagues. We start with the messages that appear when a file opens. There may be something useful in that dialog you just dismissed! Missing fonts, in particular, deserve a look before “OK fatigue” takes over. Once the file is open, what are you actually looking at? A concert-pitch score or a transposed one? Where did that instrument go? We talk about making hidden information visible in Sibelius and Dorico, and checking whether a setting applies to one item, one part, or much more than you intended. Text styles, wildcards, and tokens get some attention, as do the various ways of showing the same music in different scores, parts, and layouts. David describes a “fragile file”: change one thing, and something elsewhere breaks. That prompts a discussion of when to use the software’s more sophisticated features and when a simpler setup might be easier for a collaborator to manage. We also look at what to include when sending a file, from comments explaining an unusual choice to a reference PDF showing how it’s supposed to look, and the proofreading checks that can help before it goes out the door. There’s plenty here for students — but we’re all students here. Have you solved a notation problem whose cause surprised you? Tell us in the comments, or at [email protected]. It may make it up the pneumatic tubes from the mailroom to the C-suite. Products mentioned Notation software Sibelius (Avid) Dorico (Steinberg) Plug-ins for Sibelius Check Redundancies (Roman Molino Dunn), included with Sibelius in Review > Plug-ins > Proof-reading Find Irregular and Misfilled Bars (Bob Zawalich) Relink Score Info In Dynamic Parts (Bob Zawalich) Fonts, templates, and tools from NYC Music Services and Notation Central Scoring Express templates for Dorico and Sibelius Notation Express for Dorico Norfolk and Pori and Lelandia fonts for Sibelius Commercial music and text fonts at Notation Central Other software Microsoft Word and Google Docs Affinity (Canva) Avid Link and Steinberg Activation Manager Time Machine (Apple) Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Key signatures All keyed up: Going keyless in your score — when to use an open key signature instead of C major All keyed up: Keyless instruments in a keyed score Styles, defaults, and overrides The elements of (house) style — podcast, 2020 Importing only certain elements of house styles in Sibelius Properties management in Dorico — why a score and its parts can look different Score preparation and production notes — David’s checklist, including making front matter in a program like Affinity Fonts The point of point sizes — why 12-point type isn’t the same size in every font Use the Tinos font as a metrically equivalent replacement for Times New Roman Leaving Finale behind — tracking down missing fonts, and making sure you have the rights to use them Dorico 6 review: Proof positive — includes Dorico 6’s change in how it handles font styles across platforms Music fonts and open standards with Daniel Spreadbury — podcast, 2020 Wildcards, tokens, and exporting Restore the link in File Info fields between score and parts in Sibelius — the title that stops updating in one part Go wild with text wildcards Finding missing staves and music The focus is on staves with the Sibelius 2020.9 update and the podcast episode Sibelius 2022.12 is “part”way to more layout independence with score subsets Sibelius 2023.2 advances score subsets and dynamic guitar staves Sibelius 2023.5: New hiding options make individually voiced parts possible from a condensed score Sibelius 2025.2 introduces decondensing parts with staff filters Condensing scores in Dorico Using Dorico’s flows and condensing features to prepare Handel’s Messiah Handing it off: setup, versions, and licensing Don’t extract parts — the case for dynamic parts, for contrast with this episode’s case for separate files in some collaborations The lowdown on updates — podcast, 2025 Sibelius updated to 2025.12; simplified upgrade path for perpetual licensees Dorico 4, planned for early 2022, will be first Steinberg product to use new licensing system Comments and proofreading Take note: Comments in Sibelius Note to self: post about Comments — from 2010, when Sibelius 6 introduced comments Dorico 3 changes the score — where comments and replies arrived in Dorico Sibelius plug-ins to help with proof-reading — Find Irregular and Misfilled Bars, Check Redundancies, and more Dorico 6.0.22 extends proofreading capabilities Score preparation and production double-checklist — podcast, June 2026 Score preparation and production checklist — podcast, 2020 Other references SIL Open Font License

You sent more questions than one episode could hold, so we split them in two. Part one was brought to you by two letters: AI. This is everything else in the mailbag, from the practical side of the music notation software and technology world. Philip Rothman and David MacDonald work through the rest of the mailbag: an iPad that won’t behave like a desktop, an app that has gone quiet, a singing plug-in that is rapidly evolving, world instruments that have to be taught to a notation program, a page somebody has to read at tempo, organizing a lifetime of files, keeping current with operating systems, and — perhaps the most practical question of all — our take in response to a question from a young copyist asking how any of this becomes a living. The answers range over layout options and staff sizes, expression maps and subscription libraries, file metadata and backup schemes, security updates and Apple silicon, and a set of accessibility guidelines deserving of wider recognition. Believe it or not, there are a few things here we plainly don’t know. Underneath most of it is the same instinct: keep the things you control in good order, and keep an exit from the things you don’t. Export the files. Learn the search box. Test the backup. Ask the player what size they can actually read. And never underestimate the value of a performance librarian in your corner. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. We take questions and suggestions year-round at [email protected]. Products mentioned Notation software and apps Sibelius (Avid) — desktop, iOS/iPadOS, Android and Chromebook Dorico (Steinberg) MuseScore Studio (Muse Group) StaffPad Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop) forScore SheetCue Sample libraries, expression maps, and playback Spotlight Collection (Native Instruments) Phoenix Orchestra (Orchestral Tools) ComposerCloud+ and the RA and Silk collections (EastWest) Musio (Cinesamples) Soniccouture Art Conductor 26 Dorico (Babylonwaves) NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments) Hardware Stream Deck (Elgato) Steam Deck (Valve) MacBook Neo (Apple) Surface (Microsoft) Files, backup, and organization Airtable Dropbox Backblaze LOCKSS — lots of copies keep stuff safe NYC Music Services / Notation Central Scoring Express Notation Express Norfolk fonts for Sibelius Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes The Q&A episodes Q & A(I) (part one of this two-parter) Half-time report: what’s new, and a call for your questions (the call that brought these in) You have questions, we have answers (2025) Asked and answered, part 1 and part 2: in awe of the DAW (2023) Sibelius for iPad and mobile The history and future of Sibelius for iPad (podcast with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak, August 2021 — the design rationale, in their own words) Sibelius arrives on iPad (review, 2021) NAMM 2026: An Avid Sibelius discussion with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak and the companion podcast Comma sense: Command Search in Sibelius Sibelius 2026.6 makes cross-staff notation no accident (auto-save on mobile, accessible touch navigation, Quick Look, Cantai support) Sibelius 2026.2 cleanses the palette (dark mode and score colors) StaffPad StaffPad is a music handwriting app (March 2015, the original Surface release) StaffPad wows with long-awaited iPad release and new free StaffPad Reader (February 2020) David William Hearn and StaffPad (podcast, 2020) StaffPad acquired by Muse Group; audio support planned (May 2021) StaffPad brings live recordings into your scores with new audio update StaffPad “captures” the imagination — and your piano performance StaffPad updates go beyond just keeping the lights on (podcast with David William Hearn, November 2023) Private equity exits Muse Group amidst MuseScore Studio leadership changes Everything we’ve written about StaffPad Cantai Cantai now sings straight from Dorico (review) Cantai 3.0.0 supports Sibelius; adds ensembles, Spanish language Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026) Dorico 6.2.20 released with Cantai vocal synthesis support and Dorico 6.2.30, which added independent Cantai voice playback Sibelius 2026.5 adds VST3 support Readability, page size, and accessibility SheetCue turns your scores into a practice flow, part of our Overture series of first looks Brief thoughts on the size of music paper The point of point sizes Orchestra librarians want you to know about parts and paper sizes Archiving, file management, and backup Get organized with music notation files (podcast) Half notes: Jane Cross on keeping music files safe (the LOCKSS conversation) File renaming and PDF Batch Utilities (podcast) Restore the link in File Info fields in Sibelius Exporting PDFs from Dorico with better filenames Sibelius 2026.8 improves lines and cross-staff ties (macOS Spotlight support, including search inside .sib files) Operating systems and platforms Music notation software and macOS Tahoe Notion Mobile 3.5 released with support for Linux, Windows on Arm devices Finale’s twilight zone and Leaving Finale behind Making a career of it With freelancing comes responsibility (podcast with Paul Beck, August 2025 — the episode Philip refers to) An interview with librarian Paul Beck How to charge for music preparation Welcome to the new Scoring Notes (how a Sibelius blog became this one) Other references UK Association for Accessible Formats: music, and their guidance on modified stave notation (PDF) RNIB: modified stave notation Windows 10 Consumer Extended Security Updates, now running through October 12, 2027 Using Intel-based apps on a Mac with Apple silicon — Apple on Rosetta and its retirement StarCraft II Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation (Faber Music)

We asked for your questions, and you sent so many that one episode couldn’t hold them. This is part one of two — and part one is brought to you by two letters: A and I. That wasn’t the plan; it’s just where the mailbag pointed. Philip Rothman and David MacDonald take on the growing expectation that artificial intelligence should be able to turn a scan, recording, or generated track into finished, usable sheet music. Why is that still so difficult? And where can AI genuinely help musicians and music preparation professionals today? The discussion ranges from optical music recognition and audio transcription to proofreading, house styles, sample libraries, score following, and the potential for language models to communicate directly with notation software. Along the way, Philip proposes the “Gould test” as the music preparation equivalent of the Turing test. Underneath it all are larger questions about the value of expertise, the role of human judgment, and where responsibility lies when the technology gets it wrong. The rest of the mailbag — the questions that have nothing to do with AI — is coming next month. Products mentioned Notation software Dorico (Steinberg) Sibelius (Avid) MuseScore Studio (Muse Group) Flat (Tutteo) StaffPad Scanning and optical music recognition NoteVision (Muse Group) Soundslice sheet music scanner Newzik PlayScore 2 SmartScore 64 Pro (Musitek) Opuscan (Tutteo) Audiveris (open source) Audio transcription Klang.io and Transcription Studio Songscription Basic Pitch (Spotify) (open source) Magenta MT3 (Google) (research) Playback and vocal synthesis NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments) Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop) AI arranging and orchestration ArrangementLabs NotationAI ScoreSynth Orchidea (IRCAM / HEM / UC Berkeley) Score following and page turning Tomplay Smart Page Turn Smartleggio Piascore SampleSumo Music Following Antescofo (IRCAM) MCP bridges (community projects) mcp-musescore dorico-mcp-server (also on PyPI) Music generation Suno NYC Music Services / Notation Central PDF Batch Utilities Other tools mentioned Name Mangler / Renamer Claude (Anthropic) Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Directly mentioned or closely related: Half-time report: what’s new, and a call for your questions (previous episode — the call for these questions) You have questions, we have answers (2025 listener questions episode) Asked and answered, part 1 (2023, the first listener-questions episode) Scanning the current OMR landscape (Steve Morell’s six-product comparison, December 2024) A snapshot of music scanning apps — and picturing the future (companion podcast) Dorico and The Rite of Spring (Stephen Taylor, January 2021) The “rite” way to copy old scores into new software (podcast with Stephen Taylor, February 2021) NAMM 2026: Sounding out the inputs with Klang.io’s Sebastian Murgul and the companion podcast NAMM 2026: An Avid Sibelius discussion with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak and the companion podcast NAMM 2026: Piascore’s bet on interactivity Marie Chupeau and the human side of Newzik’s artificial intelligence (podcast, November 2021) From zero to slice: Soundslice takes on optical music recognition with AI (podcast with Adrian Holovaty, December 2022) Dorico 6: Proof positive (review — the Proofreading panel) Dorico 6.0.22 extends proofreading capabilities (the “ignore issue type” feature) Behind “Behind Bars” with Elaine Gould (podcast, July 2023) Cantai now sings straight from Dorico (review) Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026) NotePerformer reverses course (the removal of third-party Playback Engines) NotePerformer updated to 5.1.0 Comma sense: Command Search in Sibelius NAMM 2025: Imbibing and transcribing with Oriol López Calle and the companion podcast (AI-assisted transcription inside a professional service) PDF Batch Utilities get a major rebuild — and a brand new app The rights stuff (podcast — rights and permissions) Other references Carlos Peñarrubia et al., “MuSViT: A Foundation Vision Model for Sheet Music Representation” — Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence Group, University of Alicante; posted June 30, 2026, accepted at ECCV 2026. Project page Christopher W. White, The AI Music Problem: Why Machine Learning Conflicts With Musical Creativity (Routledge, 2025) Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation (Faber Music) NotePerformer: Playback Engines discontinued — Arne Wallander’s own explanation “Detecting Notational Errors in Digital Music Scores” — research on automated score checking Musicians’ Union arranging, music preparation and orchestration rates (UK) Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability — U.S. Copyright Office report

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald are back after a short break, and true to form, the conversation drifts from yard work and heat waves before landing on the actual business at hand: it’s time to open the phone lines again. For the third time — after 2023’s three-part marathon and last year’s round — Scoring Notes wants to hear directly from you, on any topic in the world of music notation software and related technology, or anywhere adjacent to it. Send your question as an email to [email protected], or record it as a voice memo and send it as an email attachment or file-sharing link, or drop it directly here. However you send it, questions are due by Wednesday, July 22, 2026, and the best of them will form the basis of the next episode. To get your wheels turning, the rest of the episode is a quick lay of the land for the first half of 2026. Dorico 6.1 and 6.2 brought a wave of guitar refinements and paragraph-level smart quotes, and picked up support for the Cantai vocal synthesis plug-in along the way. Sibelius matched that pace across three releases, capped by 2026.6‘s long-overdue fix for cross-staff accidentals, plus VST3 support and a restored dark theme. MuseScore Studio 4.7 rounded out its 4.x line with a much-improved ‘R’ for repeat, new parenthesis and bracket options, and its own Cantai support. For the full list of what shipped, plus lots more from Scoring Notes’ coverage of the first six months of the year, see our mid-year summer summary. Cantai itself has moved fast since Richard deCosta joined the podcast in May: it now runs across Dorico, Sibelius, and MuseScore Studio, and pricing has come down substantially to a unified $9.99/month or $149 lifetime license, with new “Ottetto” choir ensembles added along the way. Full details are in our Cantai 3.0.0 coverage. Finally, Philip previews news he’s especially excited about: the 2027 MOLA Conference heads to San Francisco, April 30 – May 3, with a reimagined Tech Fair that he’ll be producing and programming himself, built around a single throughline — the life cycle of a score. He’s inviting participation from anyone working in music technology, notation, publishing, or archiving, and floats the idea of adjacent meetups for groups like the W3C Music Notation Community Group, the MEI community, and the MIDI Association. Full details are in our MOLA 2027 announcement. Meanwhile, get those questions in by July 22, and enjoy the rest of your summer. Products mentioned Notation software Dorico (Steinberg) Sibelius (Avid) MuseScore Studio (Muse Group) Vocal synthesis Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop) Organizations MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians W3C Music Notation Community Group MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) MIDI Association Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Directly mentioned or closely related: Asked and answered, part 1 (2023, the first listener-questions episode) Send us your questions! (plus a classic episode) (2025) Score preparation and production: a double-checklist (previous episode) Some more summer summaries (full mid-year recap of news, reviews, and tips) Sibelius 2026.6 makes cross-staff notation no accident Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026) Cantai 3.0.0 supports Sibelius; adds ensembles, Spanish language MOLA 2027 heads to San Francisco with Tech Fair 2.0 NAMM 2026: An interview with John Barron (podcast) NAMM 2026: An interview with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak (podcast)

Six years after our “Score preparation and production notes” episode — Episode No. 2 — essentially launched the podcast, 163 episodes later, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald return to the article that inspired the conversation: David’s score preparation checklist. The principles — respect for performers, readable parts, enough time for page turns — are as true as ever. But almost every specific tool reference in the original has a fuller story now. The conversation moves section by section, serving as a reminder of the timeless principles and exploring all of the meaningful changes in the technology. Dorico’s live-reference cue system has become the standard no one else has matched — and the ease of it has quietly changed how generously cues get applied. The Dorico 6 Proofreading panel represents a new category of preparation tool, while the Sibelius plugin ecosystem has its own parallel answers. The condensing and decondensing workflows now available in both Dorico and Sibelius 2025.2 have transformed what was once among the most tedious jobs in parts preparation, and Sibelius 2025.7’s Auto-Respace toggle closes a gap that used to just be accepted. Two sections are entirely new to the checklist: digital delivery — where the iPad has become as common in rehearsal as a music stand — and a pointed look at the file-organization habits that make or break a delivery package. This one’s chock-full of tips, resources and advice — with David’s updated accompanying article to come soon. Products mentioned Notation software Dorico (Steinberg) Sibelius (Avid) MuseScore Studio (Muse Group) Finale (MakeMusic) (mentioned as discontinued) Fonts MusGlyphs (available at Notation Central) NYC Music Services / Notation Central PDF Batch Utilities Desktop publishing and document tools Affinity (Canva) (now free) Apple Pages Microsoft Word LibreOffice Other tools mentioned Claude Cowork (Anthropic) (mentioned for AI-assisted file organization) Name Mangler / Renamer (mentioned briefly for file naming) forScore (mentioned as a score-reading app) Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Directly mentioned or closely related: Score preparation and production Notes (David’s original 2018 article) Score preparation and production checklist (Episode 2, 2020) Partying with parts, part 1 (podcast, December 2021) Partying with parts, part 2 (podcast, December 2021) Orchestra librarians want you to know about parts paper sizes (May 3, 2022) Orchestra librarians want you to know about instrument names (June 20, 2022) Behind “Behind Bars” with Elaine Gould (podcast, July 2023) Behind Bars: General Conventions edition published (June 2023) Dorico 6: Proof positive (review, April 2025 — Proofreading Panel) Dorico 6.0.22 extends proofreading capabilities (July 2025 — ignore feature) Sibelius 2025.7 brings note spacing control, UI updates (July 2025 — Auto-Respace) Sibelius 2025.2 introduces decondensing parts with staff filters (February 2025) Sibelius 2022.5 brings multi-section headers, other workflow boosts (May 2022) MusGlyphs: an advanced music text font (April 2021) PDF Batch Utilities get a major rebuild — and a brand new app (March 2026) Freshly pressed (podcast, April 2026 — PDF Batch Utilities in depth) Calculate the weight, basis weight, or grammage of paper (April 2025) Chronology of a perfect music printing job (January 2022) DJA’s Notes: Music preparation basics (Darcy James Argue, September 2023) Documenting the documenter: Lillie Harris (podcast, April 2021 — Dorico manual) David MacDonald’s updated Score Preparation and Production Notes article Other references Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation (Faber Music) — cues: p. 566; front matter: chapter 17, pp. 501–504 Elaine Gould, Behind Bars: General Conventions (Faber Music) — the first third of Behind Bars as a standalone paperback and e-book MOLA Guide (Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association) — free PDF download Sibelius plugins page (still active at sibelius.com) Darcy James Argue, Music Preparation Fundamentals for Jazz Composers & Arrangers — free download Darcy James Argue, Music Preparation for the Large Jazz Ensemble — free download (supplement to the above)

What if your notation software could sing? At the top of this episode, we play a short clip, performed entirely in Dorico with NotePerformer handling the orchestra, and a plugin called Cantai rendering the baritone voice. That voice is synthesized directly from the Dorico score with minimal configuration, and it marks the arrival of something the notation world has been waiting for for a long time. Philip Rothman and David MacDonald talk with Richard deCosta, composer, software developer, and founder of Cantai and the Turing Opera Workshop, about what it took to build it. The conversation goes deep on the technology: why synthesizing the voice is fundamentally harder than synthesizing instruments, how the phonemizer works, why Cantai renders offline rather than in real time, and what it really means to build a plugin that reads a score rather than simply receiving MIDI. Richard also explains how years of frustration with the disconnect between notation and external vocal synthesis tools — from EWQL Symphonic Choirs and WordBuilder to ACE Studio and Synthesizer V — led to the central insight behind Cantai: that the lyrics were always there in the score; they just weren’t being passed to the playback engine. We also dig into the ethical and business model Richard has built around the singers whose voices power Cantai. Every vocalist is contracted, paid a competitive recording fee, and receives an ongoing share of the product’s profits in proportion to how much their voice is used. Cantai is already live for MuseScore Studio and Dorico, and arriving for Sibelius on May 30. The roadmap — more languages, less vibrato, Broadway and jazz styles, and a thought-provoking vision for the future of real-time vocal generation — gives us plenty to look forward to. Products mentioned Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop) Turing Opera Workshop Dorico (Steinberg) Sibelius (Avid) MuseScore Studio / MuseHub (Muse Group) NotePerformer (Wallander Instruments) ACE Studio Synthesizer V (Dreamtonics) EWQL Symphonic Choirs with WordBuilder (East West) Emvoice One Vocaloid (Yamaha) Wendy Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis (1987) Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Directly mentioned or closely related: Cantai now sings straight from Dorico (companion article) Dorico 6.2.20 released with Cantai vocal synthesis support MuseScore Studio 4.6.4 released with Cantai support Using WordBuilder with Sibelius to make vocal text come alive Sibelius sings with EWQL Symphonic Choirs Scoring a 16th century ayre with Dorico and Emvoice One Scoring the 11 o’clock number with Dorico and Emvoice One

After a stretch away from the mic with NAMM coverage and a few product launches in the interim, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald return for an episode that, as David puts it, is “delightfully very nerdy.” To kick things off, David turns the tables and puts Philip in the interview seat, asking him about two significant sets of releases from Notation Central and NYC Music Services. On the Notation Express side, the big news is two-way communication between Dorico and the Stream Deck: buttons now light up to reflect what Dorico is actually doing in real time — active note durations, engaged accidentals and articulations, current mode, playback state, and more. Philip also walks through the new Note Tools folder, which lets users chain up to four buttons together to build a complete transposition or interval command before executing it in one shot, and touches on the Notation Express Keypad and the Virtual Stream Deck. The PDF Batch Utilities get equal time: native Apple Silicon builds that launch ten times faster, codesigning and notarization, source PDF info shown right in the file list, bookmarks in stitched output, smarter handling of one- and two-page files, and a brand-new fifth app — PDF-Counter — that drops a page-count CSV into any folder you throw at it. For the second half, Philip asks David about the utility apps that have quietly become indispensable in his day-to-day work. David talks through Dropzone, a Mac menu-bar app that makes dragging files to frequently-needed folders — or AirDrop, or a terminal window — almost frictionless, and Alfred, the customizable launcher he’s built out with custom searches (including a dedicated IMSLP search), file navigation shortcuts, and a direct line to his task manager. From there, the conversation turns back to the notation software itself, with a look at two features that deserve more attention than they get: Dorico’s Jump Bar and Sibelius’s Command Search, both of which let you find and fire any command just by typing for it.  Where might those tools go next, and what it would mean for notation software to understand what you’re asking for, not just what you typed? Products mentioned Notation Central / NYC Music Services Notation Express PDF Batch Utilities Stream Deck Elgato Stream Deck Virtual Stream Deck Stream Deck Mobile Mac utilities discussed by David Dropzone (Aptonic Software) Alfred Raycast (mentioned as alternative to Alfred) LaunchBar (mentioned as alternative to Alfred) Hazel (mentioned in context of Dropzone) Things (mentioned as David’s to-do app, integrated with Alfred) Other references IMSLP (Petrucci Music Library) (David’s custom Alfred search) Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Directly mentioned or closely related: Notation Express for Dorico 6: Your Stream Deck just got smarter PDF Batch Utilities get a major rebuild — and a brand new app Notation Express: Stream Deck profile for Sibelius (the original 2019 launch) Boost your workflow: a Stream Deck review (Dan Kreider’s 2018 review of the Stream Deck, pre-Notation Express) Quickly scale many PDFs with PDF-BatchScale (the original launch) PDF-MusicBinder and PDF-BatchStitch utilities for music printing Chronology of a perfect music printing job How to tape and fold pages for parts: a video tutorial (accordion-style printing) Calibrating printers and workflows NAMM 2026: On the scene (and related NAMM 2026 coverage, including the happy hour) Forthcoming (mentioned in the episode): Virtual Stream Deck article

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. In this interview, we talk with Sam Butler, Avid’s vice president of product management, and Joe Plazak, Sibelius product owner and senior principal software developer at Avid, to reflect on the philosophy behind Sibelius’s recent development approach, how user feedback shapes prioritization, and where they believe users should most clearly feel progress compared to a year ago. We also talk about automation and AI in notation, the realities of cross-platform and mobile workflows, and what Avid wants musicians to understand about its long-term commitment to Sibelius. Be sure to check out our other conversations from the NAMM Show from earlier this month. And as always, if you like this podcast episode, there’s plenty more for you from Scoring Notes — be sure to follow us right in your podcast player. More about the 2026 NAMM Show from Scoring Notes: NAMM 2026: On the scene NAMM 2026: Piascore’s bet on interactivity NAMM 2026: John Barron opens the door to Dorico’s future NAMM 2026: Sounding out the inputs with klang.io’s Sebastian Murgul NAMM 2026: Getting into a Fender-bender with Chris Swaffer NAMM 2026: An avid Sibelius discussion with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak NAMM 2026: An interview with John Barron NAMM 2026: An interview with Sebastian Murgul NAMM 2026: An interview with Chris Swaffer

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology. In this interview, we talk with Chris Swaffer, senior product manager of software at Fender, about how he thinks about Notion’s current phase in its lifecycle, what the Fender name signals to users today, and how decisions around refinement, continuity, and cross-platform consistency get made in practice. We also dig into under-the-radar improvements, accessibility as a core product principle, direct transfer between Notion and Fender Studio Pro, and how intelligent assistance can support — rather than replace — human musical judgment. Come back next week for more conversations from the NAMM Show. And as always, if you like this podcast episode, there’s plenty more for you from Scoring Notes — be sure to follow us right in your podcast player. More about the 2026 NAMM Show from Scoring Notes: NAMM 2026: On the scene NAMM 2026: Piascore’s bet on interactivity NAMM 2026: John Barron opens the door to Dorico’s future NAMM 2026: Sounding out the inputs with klang.io’s Sebastian Murgul NAMM 2026: Getting into a Fender-bender with Chris Swaffer NAMM 2026: An avid Sibelius discussion with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak NAMM 2026: An interview with John Barron NAMM 2026: An interview with Sebastian Murgul