These slides give an idea of the scope of pieces one can create with MusicEase and the quality of the resulting notation.

MusicEase is a constraint-based system with a large amount of knowledge of music notation. This allows it to handle intelligently many of the details of scoring automatically. For instance, bar lines are inserted automatically according to the current meter (time signature). If the user changes the time signature, the bar line placements change automatically, and beam scopes are automatically recomputed as directed by the new time signature. (Users can also insert barlines themselves wherever they like.) Slurs and phrase marks can often be inserted with a single keystroke combination. The end points, shape, direction and location (above or below the included notes) are automatically determined. The result is that users can create professional looking scores easily and quickly without knowing music engraving/music copyist rules. (Generally no one can create engraver quality printed music without having explicitly been trained in music copyist techniques. And incorrectly notated music is harder for trained musicians to play.)

Since many people are familiar with word processors, the notation aspect of MusicEase is designed to work much like a word processing program. For instance, pressing the G key enters the note G. Pressing the Delete key (Mac) or Backspace key (Windows) then deletes this note. Pressing the Enter key begins a new system. Pressing the Delete key (Mac) or Backspace key (Windows) at the beginning of a system appends it to the previous system. Blocks can be cut from one location and pasted into another location and then everything can be reformatted with just several keystrokes (using MusicEase's cast-off function which redetermines system breaks so that the density of notes in each system is roughly the same followed by the justify function to stretch/shrink all staves so they horizontally span from the left margin to the right margin.) Most functions are invoked via key presses which allows fast content entry as opposed to using the mouse to drag music notational elements from palettes to staves which generally requires more effort.

MusicEase supports a number of additional generally useful functions such as true transposition (as opposed to just shifting existing configurations up or down on the staff), part extraction (any combination of system staves can be extracted), scaling of the music to a large range of sizes, inverting or retrograding selected blocks of notes, combining 2 staves containing single voices into a single staff containing mixed single and double stemmed voicing and vice-versa (splitting a single staff with several voices into 2 separate staves, each containing a single voice), automatically adding chord fret diagrams, using any computer fonts for verses, titles, etc., unicode text support, and displaying music as tablature and/or as shape notes (4 or 7 shape systems --- the shapes associated with scale degrees can be fully customized.)

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