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

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 to [email protected], or record it as a voice memo and send it as an email attachment or file-sharing link, or drop it directly here. However you send it, questions are due by Wednesday, July 22, 2026, and the best of them will form the basis of the next episode. To get your wheels turning, the rest of the episode is a quick lay of the land for the first half of 2026. Dorico 6.1 and 6.2 brought a wave of guitar refinements and paragraph-level smart quotes, and picked up support for the Cantai vocal synthesis plug-in along the way. Sibelius matched that pace across three releases, capped by 2026.6‘s long-overdue fix for cross-staff accidentals, plus VST3 support and a restored dark theme. MuseScore Studio 4.7 rounded out its 4.x line with a much-improved ‘R’ for repeat, new parenthesis and bracket options, and its own Cantai support. For the full list of what shipped, plus lots more from Scoring Notes’ coverage of the first six months of the year, see our mid-year summer summary. Cantai itself has moved fast since Richard deCosta joined the podcast in May: it now runs across Dorico, Sibelius, and MuseScore Studio, and pricing has come down substantially to a unified $9.99/month or $149 lifetime license, with new “Ottetto” choir ensembles added along the way. Full details are in our Cantai 3.0.0 coverage. Finally, Philip previews news he’s especially excited about: the 2027 MOLA Conference heads to San Francisco, April 30 – May 3, with a reimagined Tech Fair that he’ll be producing and programming himself, built around a single throughline — the life cycle of a score. He’s inviting participation from anyone working in music technology, notation, publishing, or archiving, and floats the idea of adjacent meetups for groups like the W3C Music Notation Community Group, the MEI community, and the MIDI Association. Full details are in our MOLA 2027 announcement. Meanwhile, get those questions in by July 22, and enjoy the rest of your summer. Products mentioned Notation software Dorico (Steinberg) Sibelius (Avid) MuseScore Studio (Muse Group) Vocal synthesis Cantai (Turing Opera Workshop) Organizations MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians W3C Music Notation Community Group MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) MIDI Association Previous Scoring Notes posts and podcast episodes Directly mentioned or closely related: Asked and answered, part 1 (2023, the first listener-questions episode) Send us your questions! (plus a classic episode) (2025) Score preparation and production: a double-checklist (previous episode) Some more summer summaries (full mid-year recap of news, reviews, and tips) Sibelius 2026.6 makes cross-staff notation no accident Richard deCosta gives your score a voice (podcast, May 2026) Cantai 3.0.0 supports Sibelius; adds ensembles, Spanish language MOLA 2027 heads to San Francisco with Tech Fair 2.0 NAMM 2026: An interview with John Barron (podcast) NAMM 2026: An interview with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak (podcast)