WikiComposer Desktop Version is a music editing package, created with ease-of-use as a central design goal.
It is intuitive enough that most people can simply download the Demo application
and try it out. If you prefer, you can start by reading the instructions.
WikiComposer began as a project to create software that avoided the imperfections that sometimes occurred in other music editors. Many existing products have very strong features that do not aid in the tasks associated with actually creating music. After a search to find an editor that met our criteria for ease of use, WikiComposer was developed.
The actual physical characteristics of music don't change much from place to place: Pitch, position, and volume define a note, for the most part. What really differentiates a music editor is how easily it manipulates those few things. What are the problems that occur in other editors? How does WikiComposer attempt to avoid them?
Small changes were difficult to make. When using most music editors, the misplacement of a note often required an awkward process for correction. Sometimes, a user needed to move the mouse over a note, right-click, find "Increase pitch" in a menu, and then make a selection in order to change the pitch. Sometimes, moving a note forward or backward proved impossible: Rather, the old note required deletion and re-creation, simply to move it. In WikiComposer, you can cut-and-paste notes just like you can cut-and-paste words in a word processor. Or, you can move any highlighted notes by using the arrow keys while pressing the Control key. Every type of alteration takes very little time.
Over-reliance upon the mouse. The mouse is great for finding your way around an application for the first time. But power-users of any application know that nothing compares to the speed of the keyboard. (Can you imagine typing words on a graphical keyboard with the mouse, rather than on a normal keyboard?) WikiComposer contains a keyboard equivilent for almost every operation, and most importantly for cursor manipulation. Strange as it may seem, many applications don't allow moving the cursor around with arrow keys. When the difference between B and B Flat is literally a millimeter of mouse movement, errors can easily occur.
An excessive amount of attention on traditional music notation. Yes, WikiComposer contains traditional music notation. But that form of notation goes back hundreds of years, and evolved to suit the purposes of musicians reading from a page. As a result, it is not a perfect solution for editing music events on a computer. Many music editing packages contain only traditional notation. WikiComposer contains a fully-editable Piano Roll view, which allows the increased visibility and editability of musical events. Most tools that contain Piano Rolls treat them as secondary add-ons.
Prettification. There is nothing especially pretty about WikiComposer. In fact, it doesn't have the typical rows of icons containing Whole Note, Half Note, Quarter Note, etc., etc. To be certain, there's nothing difficult about making a row of Icons. But, the simple fact is that they just take up space. Pressing "1" for Whole Note, or "4" for Quarter note is much, much more efficient than moving the mouse away from the editor to click on a picture. (If your memory fails you, you can find the same options in the menu, of course.) As another example, WikiComposer doesn't denote the staff type with pictures. Again, it's easy to tack on a little picture of a treble clef, but it ultimately just gets in the way.
Disjoint between playing and editing. When you make an edit in a word processor, you can see the change immediately. After all, the written
word is a visual medium. But when you edit music, unless you have extremely well-developed ears, you cannot hear it until you play it. In most
editors, a very simple problem arises: You can only play from the beginning of the piece. Sometimes you can (through more mouse manipulations) alter the
"start point" of a performance. With WikiComposer, you can easily play a particular measure, or upto the current measure, or from
the current measure. (See the instructions for more.) Thus, the cycle between editing and listening is very quick.
In addition, by pressing the Shift key you can toggle the Cursor's ability to instantly play whatever note it is on.
For those of us without perfect pitch, this is quite useful.
No lessons learned from other applications. Many music editors ignore the innovations from the larger world of software. Without going into every detail (because some are fairly obscure) WikiComposer attempts to apply the lessons leared applications other than music applications. For example, in WikiComposer, you can allow editors to control one another--thus seeing the same notes from different perspectives. This is common in other editing applications--just not those related to music. It also has an automatic backup feature--something quite common in office applications.
Overeaching in the wrong areas. To be sure, WikiComposer does not serve every purpose. For instance, it is not suitable for printing notation for use by an orchestra. (In fact, as of version 1.1, there is no print functionality.) There are some software packages that can print beautiful scores that follow the rules of music notation very closely.
For those who have already tried the Online Version, the Desktop version of WikiComposer contains the following differences:
WikiComposer began as a project to create software that avoided the imperfections that sometimes occurred in other music editors. Many existing products have very strong features that do not aid in the tasks associated with actually creating music. After a search to find an editor that met our criteria for ease of use, WikiComposer was developed.
The actual physical characteristics of music don't change much from place to place: Pitch, position, and volume define a note, for the most part. What really differentiates a music editor is how easily it manipulates those few things. What are the problems that occur in other editors? How does WikiComposer attempt to avoid them?
Small changes were difficult to make. When using most music editors, the misplacement of a note often required an awkward process for correction. Sometimes, a user needed to move the mouse over a note, right-click, find "Increase pitch" in a menu, and then make a selection in order to change the pitch. Sometimes, moving a note forward or backward proved impossible: Rather, the old note required deletion and re-creation, simply to move it. In WikiComposer, you can cut-and-paste notes just like you can cut-and-paste words in a word processor. Or, you can move any highlighted notes by using the arrow keys while pressing the Control key. Every type of alteration takes very little time.
Over-reliance upon the mouse. The mouse is great for finding your way around an application for the first time. But power-users of any application know that nothing compares to the speed of the keyboard. (Can you imagine typing words on a graphical keyboard with the mouse, rather than on a normal keyboard?) WikiComposer contains a keyboard equivilent for almost every operation, and most importantly for cursor manipulation. Strange as it may seem, many applications don't allow moving the cursor around with arrow keys. When the difference between B and B Flat is literally a millimeter of mouse movement, errors can easily occur.
An excessive amount of attention on traditional music notation. Yes, WikiComposer contains traditional music notation. But that form of notation goes back hundreds of years, and evolved to suit the purposes of musicians reading from a page. As a result, it is not a perfect solution for editing music events on a computer. Many music editing packages contain only traditional notation. WikiComposer contains a fully-editable Piano Roll view, which allows the increased visibility and editability of musical events. Most tools that contain Piano Rolls treat them as secondary add-ons.
Prettification. There is nothing especially pretty about WikiComposer. In fact, it doesn't have the typical rows of icons containing Whole Note, Half Note, Quarter Note, etc., etc. To be certain, there's nothing difficult about making a row of Icons. But, the simple fact is that they just take up space. Pressing "1" for Whole Note, or "4" for Quarter note is much, much more efficient than moving the mouse away from the editor to click on a picture. (If your memory fails you, you can find the same options in the menu, of course.) As another example, WikiComposer doesn't denote the staff type with pictures. Again, it's easy to tack on a little picture of a treble clef, but it ultimately just gets in the way.
Disjoint between playing and editing. When you make an edit in a word processor, you can see the change immediately. After all, the written
word is a visual medium. But when you edit music, unless you have extremely well-developed ears, you cannot hear it until you play it. In most
editors, a very simple problem arises: You can only play from the beginning of the piece. Sometimes you can (through more mouse manipulations) alter the
"start point" of a performance. With WikiComposer, you can easily play a particular measure, or upto the current measure, or from
the current measure. (See the instructions for more.) Thus, the cycle between editing and listening is very quick.
In addition, by pressing the Shift key you can toggle the Cursor's ability to instantly play whatever note it is on.
For those of us without perfect pitch, this is quite useful.
No lessons learned from other applications. Many music editors ignore the innovations from the larger world of software. Without going into every detail (because some are fairly obscure) WikiComposer attempts to apply the lessons leared applications other than music applications. For example, in WikiComposer, you can allow editors to control one another--thus seeing the same notes from different perspectives. This is common in other editing applications--just not those related to music. It also has an automatic backup feature--something quite common in office applications.
Overeaching in the wrong areas. To be sure, WikiComposer does not serve every purpose. For instance, it is not suitable for printing notation for use by an orchestra. (In fact, as of version 1.1, there is no print functionality.) There are some software packages that can print beautiful scores that follow the rules of music notation very closely.
For those who have already tried the Online Version, the Desktop version of WikiComposer contains the following differences:
- The Desktop Version gives you control over sending and receiving data from external MIDI devices, such as keyboards and synthesizers.
- While the Online version saves files to a remote server, the Desktop version saves and Loads MIDI files to your hard drive in a conventional manner.
- The Desktop version doesn't have the performance constraints typical of applications running in a web brower.