[theOnliest]

This looks pretty cool, and would be really useful as a kind of scratchpad to get ideas down without having to deal with the hassle of opening a Finale file or finding some scratch paper around.

Is there (or are there plans for) an export to traditional notation? I'm sympathetic to the benefits of a modified piano-roll notation, but if you want to have your little ditty for saxophone, English horn, and piano performed by human beings, they're not going to be able to do so without a lot of practice.

Traditional notation (although perhaps "antiquated" for some uses) is remarkably efficient from the perspective of information density, and musicians could easily sight read the two bars of music there without thinking about it at all. It's also widely known by most musicians, and able to deal with lots of things you'd need if you wanted to hear your music performed. (For example: presumably your composition is written in sounding pitch; your wind players would need to transpose from concert pitch or have transposed scores somehow.)

[archagon]

Well, the problem is that since you can plop down notes anywhere you like and drag them out to any length, the notation algorithm has to be very good at quantization. (Did you really mean to put a dotted thirty-second note triplet in there or was it just sloppy writing?) Also, each instrumental layer in the app is polyphonic, and notes can overlap each other any number of times. It's not always possible to cleanly assign notes to discrete voices, which traditional notation kind of demands.

I realize it's probably not a satisfying answer, but the way I see Composer's Sketchpad fitting into people's lives is that they use the app to work out their rough drafts and then recreate the finished, pristine pieces by hand in their preferred notation software or sequencer. Still, it's definitely on my potential feature list.

(Technically, you can already convert your pieces to notation by exporting to MIDI and importing it into a DAW like Logic, which supports traditional notation as one of its views. MuseScore also allows for MIDI import, and I think it does a bit of a better job.)

I completely agree that traditional notation is the way to go for live performance and certainly not antiquated in that regard. However, you're not going to be reading guitar solos off a sheet of staff paper, either! I mostly designed the app with interactive composition in mind, not performance.