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Ownership of the staffpad company

Often when a company is acquired, they will post a blog post or something to acknowledge it and indicate the future direction. I always thought Steinberg should buy Staffpad given the momentum with Dorico.

Seems like the creators have lost control of the company - and probably the tech too. Maybe it was a cash out opportunity for them after working on it for years. Maybe sales weren’t enough for them to warrant the continued effort and they wanted to hand off the reins. TBD what the new owners will do (if anything). I didn’t buy any of the expansion libraries - though as stated above, they’ll continue to work as is with the current version.
 
I'm less worried about Staffpad than I am about Native Instruments. It's not as if Staffpad has been purchased by some hedge fund or investment group, but a company that is already dedicated to music notation.

I would hazard a guess that they wanted to get their hands on the excellent default playback from Staffpad and to incorporate that into Musescore.

If Staffpad had been acquired by Apple, the first thing they would have done is killed the Surface version, In some ways I kind of wish they had, as its the sort of beautiful app with little competition they would throw some resources at. It would hardly have been milk money to them, but it would have been tough for the PC Guys.

Although I'm not in the market, I looking forward to the new product being announced on Monday by Apple. I'm ready for a new Mac though, but its got to be at least 64gb, and I think I'm going to be disappointed......
 
If anyone hasn't already, check out Tantacrul on youtube. He was very critical of Musescore's design and now has been hired to revamp the whole thing to rival every other notation software. From watching the time he spent designing the new font I'm sure Staffpad is in good hands.










 
So I reached out to David and asked him to allay my concerns. He did. He is very much involved and confident that "the future of the app is now brighter!"......so I am happy and can't wait. I am pleased it's still basically his baby. Worry not !

best
ed
 
If anyone hasn't already, check out Tantacrul on youtube. He was very critical of Musescore's design and now has been hired to revamp the whole thing to rival every other notation software. From watching the time he spent designing the new font I'm sure Staffpad is in good hands.


A couple of weeks ago when I learned of the sale, I sought out everything I could find about Musescore, and I stumbled on this video. I felt much better after I watched it. The passion that went into designing that font spoke volumes to me. You have to know that StaffPad is DWH's baby, and you have to assume that he only sold to a like-minded person. It looks like we are in good hands with Tantacrul (Martin Keary). Time will tell.
 
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A couple of weeks ago when I learned of the sale, I sought out everything I could find about Musescore, and I stumbled on this video. I felt much better after I watched it. The passion that went into designing that font spoke volumes to me. You have to know that StaffPad is DWH's baby, and you have to assume that he only sold to a like-minded person. It looks like we are in good hands with Tantacrul (Martin Keary). Time will tell.

Yes I hope so. It sounds like Ultimate guitar are putting a lot of money into developing Musescore with Martin leading as designer
 
the tech involved would work well in a DAW with the full sample libraries using the score/notation editor.
From all I read the opposite is the case. DAWs all basically send MIDI to a VSTi regardless of wether from the piano roll, in realtime from a controller hardware or the notation editor and the good results of Staffpad's playback engine are based on it doing things like look ahead and sort out sample choice and order which is only possible by tailoring the sample libraries to its needs and most importantly giving up on realtime playback.

So, I can't really see anything like a Staffpad playback plugin or something like that for DAWs
 
So I reached out to David and asked him to allay my concerns. He did. He is very much involved and confident that "the future of the app is now brighter!"......so I am happy and can't wait. I am pleased it's still basically his baby. Worry not !

best
ed
With the best will in the world, CEOs of recently acquired companies do not typically announce "it's game over, man" unless the takeover was especially hostile (which is tricky with private companies though not impossible when VCs are involved). Some will be on earn-out contracts; others will be heading off to do something new but are not keen to rock the boat because they will want to raise money for that something else.

EDIT: do'h, managed to confuse MuseScore with something else. Deleted that stuff.

However, things easily be better under the new ownership. One of the complaints I've noticed is the over-reliance on handwriting entry making some edits harder than they need to be. That might change with different priorities, particularly for collaborative writing where you're going to get people used to all manner of notation software.
 
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Wow!! That made my day - it's going to be so interesting to see how Audacity is going to develop.
It was also great to see the people behind it, and their unbounded enthusiasm!
 
I am not sure how to feel about Staffpad roadmap for audio support.

I was looking at it as a notation component that I can integrate in a system that I set up, with the DAW of my own choice.

But it sounds like it wants to become a closed ecosystem not compatible with anything else, so we'll have to keep buying the same libraries twice until we have two fully functional DAWs on the same computer.

I'm really not a fan of closed systems. But I'm even more disappointed with Steinberg, who are not racing to implement handwriting into Dorico and are not working 24/7 to fully integrate Dorico and Cubase. That's not just myopic, it's irresponsible from the business standpoint.

EDIT: on second thought, I'm guessing I'll still be able to keep Staffpad as notation tool if I choose
 
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Importing your own Audio is one of the main features I wish for since I have StaffPad. I just hope all features will be continued also on Windows, because in the text its all about Apple.
 
I am not sure how to feel about Staffpad roadmap for audio support.

I was looking at it as a notation component that I can integrate in a system that I set up, with the DAW of my own choice.

But it sounds like it wants to become a closed ecosystem not compatible with anything else, so we'll have to keep buying the same libraries twice until we have two fully functional DAWs on the same computer.

I'm really not a fan of closed systems. But I'm even more disappointed with Steinberg, who are not racing to implement handwriting into Dorico and are not working 24/7 to fully integrate Dorico and Cubase. That's not just myopic, it's irresponsible from the business standpoint.

EDIT: on second thought, I'm guessing I'll still be able to keep Staffpad as notation tool if I choose
You can port the audio files to your DAW just like MIDI files (XML). It simply gives you the ability to work with audio within StaffPad. Perhaps someday StaffPad will be one-cart shopping, but as is, the audio quality isn't high enough to actually replace a DAW.

The most eye-opening statement to me was: "David says that more powerful devices like the M1 iPad Pro will allow the user to record directly onto an instrument staff. . . ." This suggests to me that my 2020 iPad Pro could soon be obsolete. Perhaps that is what has to happen to improve the overall audio quality of the current samples, but I don't relish the idea of buying a new iPad just yet.

I would love a version of StaffPad wherein I could truly leave my DAW behind, but I would also like the ability to use StaffPad on my desktop with actual samples--or at least samples that aren't pared down quite so much. I would also like to see some fairness in the treatment of current sample owners (speaking of a desktop or iPad Pro version now). I completely understand that the samples purchased for StaffPad are recreated anew for StaffPad (and we are lucky to have them), but I hate to imagine a world wherein high-quality samples are available for a powerful iPad Pro or a desktop version and I have to pay a third time for Berlin Strings and etc. It hardly seems equitable that current Berlin series owners would have to pay yet again for the same samples (admittedly re-edited). The future looks, bright, exciting, and expensive.

Edit: I should also add that I really hope future versions embrace multiple means of note entry, which remains a tedious process.
 
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