Overture (software) - Background and Notability

Background and Notability

Because of the complexity of producing musical scores to publishers' standards, it took a long time for scorewriter software capable of producing professional-quality scores containing complex or non-standard notation to be developed.

In the early 1990s, the music notation software market was dominated by the Finale program, published by Coda. It was capable of handling large, complicated scores and non-traditional notation. However, its immense power and flexibility came at the expense of making the software, as it was then, extremely difficult to learn to use, due to its large number of operating modes. Different musical markings could only be edited when the user had first selected the appropriate editing mode, making editing a very laborious task in comparison to editing in more recent versions of Finale or other programs.

At the same time, a number of music scoring programs with more intuitive user interfaces became available, of which Encore became the most popular. Encore was first published by Passport Designs, and featured the ability to add notes simply by clicking on a staff with the mouse pointer, and most notational elements could be selected using the mouse.

A notable survey of this situation, and the music notation software of the time (largely dominated by programs for the Macintosh), was published by Professor Alan Belkin of the University of Montreal. Among other issues, it pointed out the differences between these two approaches to scorewriter software design, and the problems associated with each approach.

In an effort to produce a music notation program that was user-friendly and had powerful features, Overture was based on Encore's intuitively designed and user-friendly interface, yet it is capable of producing large complex scores, handling non-standard music notation (such that found in avant-garde and early music), while also giving full control of all MIDI playback data.

Overture is notable for being the first easy-to-use WYSIWYG notation package which could produce professional scores containing non-standard notation such as noteheads with non-standard shapes; or staves with other than five staff lines.

Overture is also notable for being the first music notation software which gave the user control over all MIDI playback data, which is invisible on the score (such as note velocity, pitch bend and duration). The software introduced a MIDI data editing view where the notes appear as strips on a scrolling piano roll, and can be moved and edited using the mouse.

The program was one of the first music notation packages to always show the score in WYSIWYG page view. Most previous music notation packages either lacked a WYSIWYG view, or swapped between a scrolling editing view and a page view used for print previews or certain editing functions.