Hosted by The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the 43rd annual conference of MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians ran from May 30 through June 2, 2025, and brought together music librarians, publishers, vendors, composers, performers, and technology enthusiasts.

The 2025 conference was the first one hosted by a university, reflecting the organization’s broader membership. It spotlighted the working environments of the academic performance librarian and offered opportunities to cross-pollinate ideas across ensemble tiers and types.

On the podcast, David MacDonald and Philip Rothman recap the 2025 MOLA Conference recorded in person from the University of Michigan, with a summary of the tech fair and conference sessions on broadening access, copyright, professional development, IMSLP, and much more.

And, if you like your podcasts in video format, we have a special treat for you: A video of this podcast episode, recorded live.

More from Scoring Notes: Road report: MOLA 2025 Conference

Steinberg’s product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury returns to the podcast to discuss Dorico 6 and its bevy of features for music composers and preparers. Daniel talks in-depth with Philip Rothman and David MacDonald about a few of the headline items, especially those that are unique to Dorico. The new proofreading tool continuously scans a project looking for potential pitfalls, and the cutaway scores feature makes quick work of what was once a tedious effort. We explore those key elements of Dorico 6 along with cycle playback, grids, fill view, chord symbols, and more, learning more about their origins and what’s planned for the future.

We also reflect with Daniel about the software’s trajectory in the past decade. Dorico has gotten ever more capable in the audio area in recent years, more deeply integrated with Cubase, Steinberg’s digital audio workstation, and Daniel takes us behind the scenes to tell us about the decisions and development plans in those areas. Finale’s end has also brought challenges and opportunities for the Dorico team, and we discuss how Steinberg’s partnership with MakeMusic and its endorsed path to Dorico has influenced the product’s direction over the past year.

More from Scoring Notes:

Dorico 6 review: Proof positive

We’re very pleased to bring you this episode, and more to come in the future, thanks to our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast that tells the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.

From electric guitars to samplers to drum machines and beyond, the music we love is only possible thanks to the technology used to create it. In many ways, the history of popular music is really a history of technological innovation. In this episode, Twenty Thousand Hertz partnered with BandLab to unpack four inventions that changed music forever. Featuring author and journalist Greg Milner.

Music featured in this episode:

Original music by Wesley Slover

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.

If you hear the term “forensic musicologist” and conjure up detectives with fingerprint dusters and a magnifying glass, well, metaphorically you’re not far off. The job of a forensic musicologist is to  apply musical knowledge to questions around copyright, explain  musical facts, and put them into context so that a court can arrive at a decision with the best information available.

Brian McBrearty is a forensic musicologist, and he joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to discuss real-world cases of music infringement and the multi-dimensional approach that he takes in his analyses. We tackle the question of music notation and how it plays a role in Brian’s process, and talk tech — including the acceleration in artificial intelligence, both as a potential means of forensic analysis, and as a creator of potentially infringing content.

More on Scoring Notes:

The rights stuff, with Jim Kendrick

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology.

This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with John Barron, the international product specialist for Dorico. NAMM offers representatives like John the opportunity to meet with customers from both the notation and audio sides of the music community. We spoke about the new Dorico-powered score editor in Cubase that appeals to a large cross-section of users, and how Dorico fits into the wider world of Steinberg and Yamaha products. We also discussed industry developments and what he’s hearing from Finale users as they explore the officially-endorsed migration path to Dorico.

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 2025 NAMM Show from Scoring Notes:

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology.

This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with Martin Keary, the head of software for Muse Group. Martin spoke with me about the conversations he had at NAMM about some of the exciting possibilities for MuseScore collaborations and integrations with other app makers in the future. More practically, we also discussed recent MuseScore development efforts and some of the new features we can expect to see in upcoming releases, as well as the role that industry changes like the end of Finale played in the road map for the software.

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 2025 NAMM Show from Scoring Notes:

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology.

This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with Oriol López Calle from My Sheet Music Transcriptions, a service that he founded in 2011 that has since grown to employ dozens of people and serve tens of thousands of customers. Oriol told us about his company’s approach to their work, which includes not only transcribing but a full range of music preparation tasks. We also discussed technological innovations that have already transformed the business and those that we expect to do so in the future.

Come back the next couple of weeks 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 2025 NAMM Show from Scoring Notes:

At the 2025 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology.

This podcast episode is a conversation Philip Rothman had with Sam Butler, Avid’s director of product management. Sam talked with us about the new decondensing parts feature in Sibelius that Avid previewed at NAMM, and he celebrated the award that his team received for last year’s release of the Android app. He also shared his thoughts on the industry’s developments over the past year, the direction that he anticipates for the future, and what it all means for Sibelius customers.

Come back the next few weeks 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 2025 NAMM Show from Scoring Notes:

This episode was written by Andrew Anderson.

We’re very pleased to bring you this episode, and more to come in the future, thanks to our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast that tells the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.

The history of recorded sound stretches back over a hundred and fifty years, starting with a device that could “record” a voice on a piece of paper. Today, we can enjoy lossless streaming anywhere we go… but getting here wasn’t easy. In this episode, our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz worked with Qobuz, the high quality music platform, to chart the history of audio mediums, from cylinders made of tin foil and wax, to vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CDs, and mp3s. Along the way, they explore the innovations and quirks of each format, with memories sent in from their listeners and the 20K team. Featuring Adam Tovell from the British Library Sound Archive.

Then, stay tuned afterwards as David MacDonald and Philip Rothman tie all of this “related technology” back to the “music notation” portion of the Scoring Notes mission, and explore how music notation and recorded sound are complementary sides of what makes a song a song.

Further reading:

What Is a Song?, by Ben Sisario from The New York Times, about the copyright questions raised in the lawsuit involving Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” and Ed Sheeran’s song “Thinking Out Loud”.

Further listening:

The [COMPRESSED] history of mastering

Music featured in this episode:

Original music by Wesley Slover

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.

Art by Divya Tak.

Music scanning technology, or optical music recognition (OMR) if you like, has been around for decades, and yet in many ways is still barely out of infancy. But that could soon change as classic algorithm-based desktop programs converge with newer mobile apps and web-based machine learning tools.

Steve Morell joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to discuss his review of six of those products that run the gamut of those technologies: Newzik, Soundslice, PlayScore 2, Sheet Music Scanner, SmartScore 64 Pro 64 NE, and ScanScore Professional. He takes on through his process of testing each of them from the common perspective of a user wanting to get a quick and accurate scan for exporting via MusicXML to other software such as Sibelius, Dorico, or MuseScore.

However, those applications have many other use cases. We explore those as well, and how each of the products may be suited to one particular use or another in their own way. We also envision where the industry is headed and how these technologies could potentially evolve in the future.

Read the full Scoring Notes review: Scanning the current OMR landscape