At NYC Music Services we’re pleased to announce a new site for music notation software users to explore and enjoy. Notation Central is a marketplace for music notation technology, with fonts, utilities, templates, plug-ins, and more.
Notation Central is now where you’ll find the digital products offered directly by NYC Music Services like the Notation Express Stream Deck profiles for Sibelius, Dorico, and Musescore, the PDF batch utilities, and the Norfolk and Pori fonts for Sibelius.
Why Notation Central?
If you keep up with the developments around here, you know that we’ve been providing these tools to users for many years. Our proficiency in music notation software and direct communication line to the software companies keep us on top of the very latest developments in the field.
Notation Central was born from the realization that our knowledge and our unique position in the industry could make it possible for many more users to discover the incredible tools available for music notation software if more of them were available in one place — not just our products, but those of others, too!
What’s on Notation Central
To that end, we’ve already got some incredible products up on Notation Central. Check out the beautiful music fonts from Music Type Foundry for Finale and Dorico — we’ve even made it possible to purchase all eight of them at a terrific price. The neueweuse new music notation fonts are there, too, also with a bundle for you to save on all three. The font offerings are rounded out nicely with Jawher Matmati’s HP Diagram and Roman Ionic fonts and Typodermic’s Numbers With Rings and Numberpile, and we’ve got more products planned to be offered soon.
That’s not all — peruse the plug-ins like Santiago Barx’s Graphical MIDI Tools and Ozie Cargile’s UltraMix, and the highly-regarded CineScore film score templates from Cinesamples, for Sibelius and Finale.
Notation Central is easily searchable from any page and you can filter your results by platform, operating system, category, and price, so that you can find just the products most suited to your setup.
Sheet music too — unique editions formatted for iPad and tablets
We’ve also got a unique collection of sheet music. Among the offerings are beautifully engraved editions of Chopin and Beethoven piano works, and all nine Beethoven symphonies, prepared by master engraver Ephraim Hammett Jones, and all at very reasonable prices starting at $6.99. These editions are specifically formatted for iPad and other tablets with minimal white space margins. They omit headers and footers such as page numbers that are normally seen on printed editions, because there is no need for them when viewing them on a tablet — after all, that information is already available on the device.
Instead, every inch of the display is devoted to beautiful music, like this:
All of the piano works feature professional fingering applied by Mr. Jones with precise attention to detail.
We also sell the music of Jessie Montgomery, prepared by NYC Music Services.
There’s lots to browse already, and we have more products planned for Notation Central in the future. If you’re interested in selling with Notation Central, please get in touch.
A note to our readers
Above all else, we at NYC Music Services and Scoring Notes hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy during this challenging time. Although the current situation is uncertain, we plan to continue to deliver you the same news, tips, and information about music notation and related technology as best we can.
It can seem discordant to launch a new venture such as Notation Central at this moment. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a music notation technology marketplace for years, though. The store finally began to take shape in earnest a couple of months ago we’ve been working hard on it since then.
Whether you’ve already been working from home or it’s a more recent development, my hope is that you’ll discover some new tools on Notation Central that will help you be more productive and, perhaps most importantly, enjoy the process of creating musical notation.
And if you enjoy studying new and exquisite editions of classic works, and have some newfound time on your hands, the Chopin and Beethoven editions from Ephraim Hammett Jones are just about the best value anywhere.
A number of the offerings on Notation Central have a “suggested price”. This means you can pay whatever you wish, including nothing at all. That’s OK. However, these are high quality tools, and if they help you in your work, we would greatly appreciate your support at the modest suggested price in order to help continue development.
My deepest thanks to you and to the Scoring Notes community.
Bob Zawalich
Very cool, and I hope this is a successful venture! Congratulations on what must have been a lot of work to set up.
Having a place to market Sibelius plugins without needing to set up the payment structure may encourage people to write plugins for Sibelius, which would be a good thing. I am curious about how they will get installed, since they will not be able to use the Sibelius plugin installer. (I have requested to the Sibelius folks that the installer be able to do an install from a file as well as from the plugin database, and if that ever happens installing should be a lot easier).
For now, I suspect that the easiest way to install plugins that are not on the download page would be to use the Sibelius Plug-in Installer to install the plugin Install New Plugins, and then run that plugin. It will put the “plg” file into an appropriate subfolder after any zip file is unzipped, which is a big part of the problem, but you will then need to close and restart Sibelius to actually run your new plugin. Also, the Sibelius Plug-in Installer will copy things like pdf files, manuscript paper files, and house styles to appropriate locations, which a plugin cannot do, so there will still be some setup to be done.
I imagine an installer application that is not a plugin could be written to handle all the aspects of installing except for the restart problem. Have you guys considered that? I looked into it at one point but haven’t found a good way to set up an application to do this sort of thing on both Windows and Macs.
Nonetheless, you have a bunch of interesting things in your marketplace. Congratulations!
Philip Rothman
Thanks, Bob. Indeed, for the Ultramix plug-in, we have recommended the exact process you’ve suggested. (click on the “Installation” tab to see it). Graphical MIDI Tools already came with its own instructions but I imagine we will standardize this in time.
The idea of creating an installer for plug-ins we offer is not trivial but it’s not impossible, either. We already create installers for Notation Express. For now, though, let’s see if this is something that Avid can add in a future version of Sibelius, as I agree that would be the easiest solution.
Alex
Thanks. One question. Where can I try/buy that font for fingering from that screenshot of Sonate? I use Sibelius.
And, by the way, that screenshot-example doesn’t match the proportions of iPad screen (12.9″ version). It is more square than an iPad’s screen with 3:4 aspect ratio. Thus, it doesn’t fill the entire screen, leaving large unoccupied areas at the top and bottom. This is strange.
Philip Rothman
Alex: I don’t know which fingering font is used in the example. Regarding the proportions, I cropped it for the blog post so there wouldn’t be extra white space in the blog. If you purchase the actual product (which is a PDF, not an image) you will see that it fits the iPad screen properly.
Alex
Thank you Philip.
Bora
Congratulations,
This new portal looks awesome. I would like to ask a question regard MTF Beethoven Verlag kind of fonts since I always used their books. They look very beatiful. But I saw that there is no way to use them with Sibelius. Are there other any fonts which I can use with Sibelius and look like Henle Verlag editions?
Thank you
Best regards
Philip Rothman
Hi Ilkay, thanks as always for your support. I don’t know of a specific “Henle” font which works with Sibelius but I know that it is something that Abraham (the designer) hopes to do eventually.
Peter Roos
Terrific, congratulations Philip!
Philip Rothman
Thanks, Peter!
Santiago Barx
Congratulations Philip on this achievement. The sites looks wonderful and I’m sure it will be of great help for everyone involved in the music notation and MIDI industry.
Glad to be on board.
All the best,
SB
Philip Rothman
Thanks, Santiago. I’m very happy to have your excellent Graphical MIDI Tools plug-in available on Notation Central.
Matan Daskal
Bravo
Philip Rothman
Thanks!
Kambro
Excellent idea ! Thanks to this site, I learn that there is already a nice collection of SMuFL fonts. I thought there were only two or three of them.
Good luck !
Philip Rothman
Thanks, Kambro!