Scoring Notes

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.

Notation software

Plug-ins for Sibelius

Fonts, templates, and tools from NYC Music Services and Notation Central

Other software

Key signatures

Styles, defaults, and overrides

Fonts

Wildcards, tokens, and exporting

Finding missing staves and music

Handing it off: setup, versions, and licensing

Comments and proofreading

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].

Notation software and apps

Sample libraries, expression maps, and playback

Hardware

Files, backup, and organization

NYC Music Services / Notation Central

The Q&A episodes

Sibelius for iPad and mobile

StaffPad

Cantai

Readability, page size, and accessibility

Archiving, file management, and backup

Operating systems and platforms

Making a career of it

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.

Notation software

Scanning and optical music recognition

Audio transcription

Playback and vocal synthesis

AI arranging and orchestration

Score following and page turning

MCP bridges (community projects)

Music generation

NYC Music Services / Notation Central

Other tools mentioned

Directly mentioned or closely related:

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.

Notation software

Vocal synthesis

Organizations

Directly mentioned or closely related:

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.

Notation software

Fonts

NYC Music Services / Notation Central

Desktop publishing and document tools

Other tools mentioned

Directly mentioned or closely related:

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.

Directly mentioned or closely related:

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?

Notation Central / NYC Music Services

Stream Deck

Mac utilities discussed by David

Other references

Directly mentioned or closely related:

Forthcoming (mentioned in the episode):

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:

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:

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology.

In this conversation, we speak with Sebastian Murgul, co-founder and CEO of klang.io, to talk about a category that sits just adjacent to music notation — and yet increasingly intersects with it in practical, unavoidable ways: music transcription. Sebastian explains what klang.io’s tools are designed to do — and just as importantly, what they are not. We talk about why AI-based transcription has reached a point of practical usefulness now, where the hardest musical problems still lie, and how klang.io thinks about accuracy as something musicians can trust and build on, rather than a promise of perfection. We also discuss interoperability with notation software via formats like MIDI and MusicXML, real-world use cases that have surprised him, and the broader anxieties musicians understandably have around automation and AI.

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 2026 NAMM Show from Scoring Notes: