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PODCAST

Scoring Notes

We love music notation software and related products and technology, so that’s what we cover here. You’ll find timely news, in-depth coverage about the field, and honest reviews about products you use every day. You’ll learn about the interesting people in our field and find out our opinions on ever-changing developments in the industry.

music music interviews

All Episodes

1:10:07

Getting on the same page

Scoring Notes ·

2026/10/03

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

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1:33:17

Q & A(gain)

Scoring Notes ·

2026/09/05

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

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1:33:03

Q & A(I)

Scoring Notes ·

2026/08/01

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

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30:04

Half-time report: what’s new, and a call for your...

Scoring Notes ·

2026/07/04

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

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1:28:57

Score preparation and production double-checklist

Scoring Notes ·

2026/06/06

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

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56:56

Richard deCosta gives your score a voice

Scoring Notes ·

2026/05/02

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

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1:18:13

Freshly pressed

Scoring Notes ·

2026/04/04

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:

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37:13

NAMM 2026: An interview with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak

Scoring Notes ·

2026/02/28

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

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29:00

NAMM 2026: An interview with Chris Swaffer

Scoring Notes ·

2026/02/21

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,

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33:24

NAMM 2026: An interview with Sebastian Murgul

Scoring Notes ·

2026/02/14

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

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42:34

NAMM 2026: An interview with John Barron

Scoring Notes ·

2026/02/07

At the 2026 NAMM Show, we interviewed representatives from the businesses in our field of music notation software and related technology.In this conversation with John Barron, international product specialist at Steinberg, John reflects on Dorico’s current development phase, how its underlying design principles continue to guide day-to-day decisions, and where users should most clearly feel progress compared to a year ago. We also talk about under-the-radar features, user feedback, interoperability

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32:24

Perfect Pitch: Unlocking Jacob Collier’s musical...

Scoring Notes ·

2025/12/06

We’re very pleased to bring you this episode, and more to come in the future, thanks to our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast that tells the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.People with perfect or “absolute” pitch hear every single sound as precise musical notes. Is this extraordinary talent a blessing or a curse? In this episode, our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz dive into the neuroscience, pluses, and pitfalls of absolute pitch

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1:02:11

A Scoring Notes holiday shopping trip

Scoring Notes ·

2025/11/22

‘Tis the season to be thankful for all of the products and services in the world of music notation software and related technology, and for the Scoring Notes audience who tunes in to hear us opine on them! We show our appreciation by bearing good tidings and do a little shopping to find some Black Friday deals and make a few recommendations for fun and productivity.Black Friday 2025 deals for music notation software and related tech post coming on Monday, November 24 Show notes: Scoring Notes

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58:38

Cleo Huggins, the designer of the first music font...

Scoring Notes ·

2025/11/01

We talk a lot about fonts on the Scoring Notes podcast. But there was a time when there were no music fonts. And then, there was one.Cleo Huggins, on the staff of Adobe in 1986, designed Sonata, the very first music font. It’s hard to imagine today, but it was revolutionary at the time, and a leading industry publication called it the “Music Product of the Year”. Sonata provided the blueprint for the core music fonts later created for use in Finale and Sibelius, but it may

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1:11:51

You have questions, we have answers

Scoring Notes ·

2025/08/09

We open the Scoring Notes mailbag, contemplate the musings of our audience, and try to leave no question unanswered in this fun and informative podcast episode.More from Scoring Notes, referenced in this episode: Finale’s twilight zone: Ensuring a smooth ride into the sunset Using Finale in the unsupported era Leaving Finale behind The rights stuff, with Jim Kendrick Scanning the current OMR landscape Partying with parts, part 1 Partying with parts, part 2 Working with page numbers in

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1:05:17

Send us your questions! (plus a classic episode)

Scoring Notes ·

2025/06/28

Have you ever listened to an episode of the Scoring Notes podcast and wished you could ask a question directly on the show?Two years ago, we opened up the phone lines directly, so to speak, and they were jam-packed! So much so, that we ended up devoting three episodes to answering those burning queries. You can find Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 in the podcast archives. Well, time and technology moves fast, so it’s time we do it again. Whether you’re a “long-timer” or a

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53:57

MOLA 2025 conference and tech fair wrap-up

Scoring Notes ·

2025/06/07

Hosted by The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the 43rd annual conference of MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians ran from May 30 through June 2, 2025, and brought together music librarians, publishers, vendors, composers, performers, and technology enthusiasts.The 2025 conference was the first one hosted by a university, reflecting the organization’s broader membership. It spotlighted the working environments of the academic

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1:19:18

Daniel Spreadbury on Dorico 6: “Our largest release...

Scoring Notes ·

2025/05/03

Steinberg’s product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury returns to the podcast to discuss Dorico 6 and its bevy of features for music composers and preparers. Daniel talks in-depth with Philip Rothman and David MacDonald about a few of the headline items, especially those that are unique to Dorico. The new proofreading tool continuously scans a project looking for potential pitfalls, and the cutaway scores feature makes quick work of what was once a tedious effort. We explore those key

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39:15

Tune Tech: Distortion, sequencers, Auto-Tune, and more

Scoring Notes ·

2025/04/05

We’re very pleased to bring you this episode, and more to come in the future, thanks to our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast that tells the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.From electric guitars to samplers to drum machines and beyond, the music we love is only possible thanks to the technology used to create it. In many ways, the history of popular music is really a history of technological innovation. In this episode, Twenty Thousand Hertz

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54:00

Holding court with Brian McBrearty, forensic...

Scoring Notes ·

2025/03/01

If you hear the term “forensic musicologist” and conjure up detectives with fingerprint dusters and a magnifying glass, well, metaphorically you’re not far off. The job of a forensic musicologist is to apply musical knowledge to questions around copyright, explain musical facts, and put them into context so that a court can arrive at a decision with the best information available.Brian McBrearty is a forensic musicologist, and he joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to

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184 results

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