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Starburst got a day job again, so, he barely works on Notessimo again.
I hope I can put some time back on Notessimo soon, it pains me to leave it in an unfinished state. I still believe there’s a great potential.
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Thank you for responding. Even if you cannot work on it much, just responding means a lot. Staying engaged with the community is important.
Yes, there is a lot of potential for V4. The imported trackers songs sound so good, so, when we can finally acess the full capabilites, the musicality of Notessimo songs will skyrocket. I can see V4 songs impressing outsiders or being used in indie games. An education version could be something to look into, kids woud love this kind of thing.
Don’t give up! Don’t let your effort go to waste. V4 full version will be a god tier music composing tool. Good luck!
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Do you have a plan for upcoming changes going forward?
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I have some times now to put back in Notessimo, the first thing I want to do is have V4 at parity with V3, it already had mostly everything done on the backend side of thing (and more!) but the UI was unfinished and unpolished.
I’ll consider this first phase of the plan a success once everyone is using V4 and not V3 to upload song on the site, so that will be my focus until then.
Afterward I’m open to suggestions, there’s a couple of things I want to do (priority wise not sure which will be done first, these are just random ideas):
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Multiplayer, like when you edit a google doc, you see everyone’s cursor and changes are added in real-time, etc. I think this could help to set Notessimo apart and promote the collab aspect. Having multiple authors credited for a song also. You grant permission to others to edit your song.
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Easier video export, this would help greatly I think to promote Notessimo on social media. Adding more customization like dynamic background images / videos / shaders to create compelling video experience (that would also be viewable in the player). Any notes could trigger a change. For example, a song could have rainy background (with the rain animation done w/ a shader) but every time a particular instrument is played a lightning animation gets triggered (again another shader) in-sync dynamically with the music. The shaders could completely change the way the notes looks or scroll as well. A new category would be added in the database as well to browse any user-generated shaders.
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Audio Shaders, this would add the possibility of adding user-generated code for instruments / effects. Shaders are usually used for graphics, modifying every pixels you see in a game but they can be used to compute anything, which include audio. So I think this could provide a nice alternative to VST since those are not cross-platform or re-distributable.
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Notessimo as a VST plugin. Maybe adding VST support for the desktop version (Pro version?) or maybe adding VST support only when it is used as a VST plugin itself. Issue with VST is that they are not “portable”, the idea behind Notessimo is also to create a portable music format that can be redistributed and sequenced on any device (especially for video games). VST are executable compiled for a specific platform so not really feasible (and there would be legal issue with bundling a VST). Song using that feature wouldn’t be sequenced at run-time (if uploaded on the site).
But yeah, we’ll see once V4 is at parity with V3, I’ll focus on what the community will want to see next.
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I’d kill for a MIDI export option when rendering video/audio from the site, too
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That’s great to hear! The parity update will really help V4. I feel like the lack of parity is the biggest thing keeping people from moving over. It’s missing some really important sound capabilities and quality of life tools that V3 has. The only V4 has over V3 is the instruments, but those missing features are more important. Once we do get parity, there won’t be much reason to use V3 anymore and I think most people will move on to V4, since now you will be able to make songs as good as V3, but with the massive V4 instrument variety.
I’m liking the ideas you have for V4.
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Multiplayer: being able to collab in real time, right in the app, will be a really fun idea. With how community focused Notessimo is, this would fit in so well. Not much music production software has this feature, so it’s something that would bring in people to try out Notessimo.
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Easier video export: the videos are definitely great for sharing and would bring in more users. All these visual features just add this extra layer of fun to the Notessimo platform. Visuals and fun are an important aspect of Notessimo, it’s almost like playing a video game. For sure, get those visual features into the player. I haven’t heard of any other music production platform that is so visual focused. Being able to go the site, click play on a song, and then to listen to it with an engaging video experience, it is another thing that would really make Notessimo stand out. Just make sure all that stuff gets disabled inside the composer mode.
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Audio shaders: interesting, I’ve never heard of audio shaders. Anywhere I can check some out? Sounds like a cool idea. If we could use them to synthesize sounds and effects, sure go ahead.
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Notessimo as a VST plugin: support would be great, but it does have the issues you’ve mentioned. You could have a version with VST support whose focus is only on creating audio files instead of uploading songs to the platform. You did say you were going to porting all the DirectX effects? Those would work on every device? Those effects would give us a set of basic music production effects. You could also port open-source effects and synths. Could you get open-source plugins working on every device?
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Thank you for all the hard work you put into this app and the site 
Maybe adding achievements for participating in the community would be a cool feature after you’re finished working on V4? Things like 1st forum post, 1st like on a song, stuff like that. But nothing that would promote pointless spamming.
EDIT: I remember a feature that I would like seeing implemented in V4, being able to replace one type of instrument with another would be pretty neat since I like experimenting with different instruments. Not having to put down the same notes to hear the same measure in a different instrument would be a gamechanger (I hope I’m not missing out on some feature like that in V3…)
Also I just notice the badges lol
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Sadly not a lot stuff online about this, I personally think there’s huge potential in it. Here’s a “reverb” done with shader, you can see the code in the “sound” tab on the right, the reverb happens on the 3rd “beep”. If you cannot hear anything try to “reset time” which is the button on the left of the play button.
There’s a lot to browse from on ShaderToy.
Oh yeah, that would be nice, as well as midi import (and maybe some retro video games format).
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The replace instrument tool will eventually be in V4, that is a part of the parity update.
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Ooh, I’m gonna try to look for that tool in V3. I knew I was living under a rock lol
I feel like the slow poke meme XD
EDIT: I FOUND IT