Nightingale

Music notation program for Macintosh

1997 Editor's Choice Award from Electronic Musician!!

Published by Adept Music Notation Solutions
Visit their web site for complete information

Spindrift uses Nightingale all the time. On this site, see:

Sample scores: All the sample pages shown in the Spindrift catalog are produced with Nightingale. You can see GIF files of individual pages or use the NoteView viewer to examine a whole score.
Nightingale FAQ: Part 1 and Part 2 by Michael Brockman at Musicware
True confessions: Notes on why I use Nightingale (keep reading below)
(4/99 no longer available) NoteView: An electronic sheet music previewer for the web (Macintosh)

Why I use Nightingale

Notes by Pamela J. Marshall

I've used Nightingale since its first release. Using it is practically automatic. It's as comfortable as driving my car. I've worked with the developer, Don Byrd, since he started and hope I've had some useful influence on Nightingale's features.

Nightingale is easy to use - all the music symbols are on a single palette so you don't have switch into different modes for entering different types of symbols. It doesn't require your music to have measures. I can enter a cadenza or a free-rhythm passage without worrying about the current time signature. I can add barlines and appropriate time signatures later or not at all.

Scores and parts
I've done all kinds of scores, from solo instruments to orchestra. The result, printed on a PostScript printer, is publisher quality. I use a PostScript emulation program on an inkjet printer and the quality is still very high. For large scores, extracting parts is a breeze. I extract a part and do some minor editing, checking pagination and adjusting the transposition if the score was in C. The parts inherit text styles and staff size, so I usually increase the staff size and reformat the part. I can adjust the text styles in the score before extracting to avoid making individual changes in every part. I'd better remember not save the score after I do that though!

Entering music
I use Step Record as the main way to enter notes. Entering one voice at a time, I can enter the music quickly and accurately. If I mess up and the voice I'm entering gets out of alignment with other voices, I can fix the wrong note and realign the voices vertically. Often I enter long passages without any barlines so that I can vertically realign the whole passage if necessary (vertical realignment works measure by measure).

Playback
I love being able to proofhear my score. Each Nightingale part can be assigned to a different MIDI channel and you can set up a different program for each part. There's a balance adjustment for each part too. My Kurzweil 2000 synthesizer has lots more programs than the 128 MIDI programs Nightingale supports so I usually turn off Nightingale's ability to send a program change for each part. I set up a program on each channel ahead of time. Nightingale doesn't provide performance quality playback - it doesn't interpret hairpin crescendi and diminuendi or ritard and accelerando - although you can adjust settings for individual notes and add hidden tempo changes to simulate them if you really want to. I'd rather use my sequencer program for that stuff.

Importing from my sequencer
Lately, I've been developing pretty detailed sequences in Vision (the sequencer from Opcode) when I'm composing for acoustic instruments. If I manage to quantize them correctly, I can export to a standard MIDI file (SMF) and import the sequence into Nightingale. I no longer avoid writing passages with lots of fast notes. The master system of the imported file doesn't usually match the master system of the final score (a single Vision track imports onto a single staff, even though you might want it on a grand staff), so I select passages and paste them into the target score.

Limitations
It's not bug free, alas. My computer, a Macintosh IIci, is getting slower all the time so I wish Nightingale redrew less of the page. It makes an effort to redraw only what it needs, but sometimes it redraws too much. One little bug results in a discrepancy between the accidental and the MIDI note number, meaning some notes sound right when they aren't notated corectly. Pasting music from a staff with a clef change (but the clef is not in the selection) to a staff with another clef doesn't always work right. Sometimes the music looks like it overlays another part -- this is easily fixed by redrawing the screen (Ctrl+~ (tilde) or reformatting the system). I have to keep my system folder clean and the OMS (Opcode MIDI System) files correctly installed to avoid conflicts among my programs and unexplained crashes.

The best tool I know
I haven't used other notation programs much. I stick with Nightingale because I'm satisfied and it makes me very productive. I can quickly produce scores and parts and I can fine-tune a score to my heart's content until I'm ready to publish it.

NoteView score viewer

(4/99 No longer available) Nightingale comes with the NoteView score viewer so that you can publish your scores on the web. It's only for Macintosh web users (which limits the audience considerably, of course), but those users can view and play your score via MIDI -- a big improvement over GIF files of individual pages.

Last updated April 20, 1998