Mosaic (also called Composer's Mosaic) was a

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

scorewriter A scorewriter, or music notation program is software for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they typically provide flexible editing and automatic layout, and p ...

application for producing music notation, developed by

Mark of the Unicorn Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) is a music-related computer software and hardware supplier developed by Jason Linhart, Craig Finseth, Scott Layson Burson, Brian Hess. It is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has created music software since 1984. ...

. First released as Professional Composer among early Macintosh software in 1984, the application introduced a user interface similar to the

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

. The main features included entering

musical notation Musical notation is any system used to visually represent music. Systems of notation generally represent the elements of a piece of music that are considered important for its performance in the context of a given musical tradition. The proce ...

, printing

sheet music Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chords of a song or instrumental musical piece. Like its analogs – printed Book, books or Pamphlet, pamphlets ...

, and support for

lyrics Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist. The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a "libretto" and their writer, ...

under the score with the font of choice. Notes could be selected from the user interface or entered from the keyboard. The user could also change or extend the

tempo In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for 'time'; plural 'tempos', or from the Italian plural), measured in beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given musical composition, composition, and is often also an indication of the composition ...

key signature In Western musical notation, a key signature is a set of sharp (), flat (), or rarely, natural () symbols placed on the staff at the beginning of a section of music. The initial key signature in a piece is placed immediately after the cl ...

meter The metre (or meter in US spelling; symbol: m) is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of ...

, and other parameters. The next major release, Professional Composer 2.0, supported writing on up to 40 staves and allowed the user to enter notes as short as 128th notes, with all operations mainly controlled by menus and dialog boxes. Version 2.0 also introduced several improvements for printing (such as automatically condensing parts with several

rest REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

measures), allowing production of professional quality scores. Although the application demanded knowledge of music theory to use its rich features, it offered only rudimentary playback capabilities. A ''

Macworld ''Macworld'' is a digital magazine and website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG. History ''Macworld'' was founded by David Bunnell and Cheryl Woodard (publishers) and Andrew Fl ...

'' review also criticized the high price (US$495 in February 1986) and the lack of automatic scrolling when staves were filled (only via scroll bars). Version 2.2 (1988) corrected several bugs and improved compatibility with Mac Plus, SE and II. Version 2.3M was the last release of Professional Composer. Mosaic entered the market in 1992 as the successor to Professional Composer. An early user review of version 1.01 criticized stability issues and problems with file importing from other applications. In version 1.58 released in 1998, the notation software removed all limits on page size, score length, number of staves, and number of voices per staff. Configuration options in different windows created a flexible but sometimes confusing user interface.

Drag and drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user (computing), user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, i ...

features and ability to convert

MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...

files into usable notation were counted among the strongest points of Mosaic. After 1998, no new versions of Mosaic were released by MOTU, and therefore was not compatible with

MacOS 10 macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

. Competing notation packages are

Sibelius Jean Sibelius (; ; born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 186520 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often ...

, Finale, and Dorico, however no direct conversion of file formats, such as via MusicXML, is possible. Mosaic users now have to rely on creating

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

files of Mosaic output under MacOS 9 and then having these read by OCR programs such as PDFtoMusic and PhotoScorePhotoScore
Neuratron. by Neuratron.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Mosaic web page
Scorewriters Orphaned technology