Ask a church music director, a band teacher or a weekend arranger about Encore, and you'll hear the same thing: it was easy. You clicked, and the note was there. Then it stopped running on new Macs, and years of scores got stuck in files nothing else would open. Otra is my answer: a notation app that runs in the browser, plays back what you write, and brings those old files back to life.

Two problems, one audience. Musicians had lost an editor that never got in their way, and they had years of work trapped in .enc files. Most alternatives are powerful but take a weekend to learn. I set a simple target: a first note in under a minute, and every old score one drop away from being useful again.

I led Otra end to end: product direction, interaction and UI design, and the front-end build, from the score editor to engraving and playback. Claude helped me crack a few of the hardest engineering problems along the way.

Rescue came first. I built a clean-room reader for Encore's file format and tested it against a private set of 1,459 real Encore files: 1,366 open as scores, more than a million notes in all. Anything that can't be carried over is listed plainly instead of silently dropped. Otra Rescue does the same for whole folders, right in the browser, so the files never leave the musician's computer.

Encore never asked anyone to read a manual, so ease of use became a set of rules instead of a hope. Core editing never opens a dialog, a note is pick then click, gaps fill with rests on their own, and nothing asks "are you sure?" because everything can be undone. Every interface decision was scored by TypeSafe Jev with ease of use carrying at least 40% of the weight, and every flow has a test that counts the clicks. If a change adds a step, the build fails.

Instead of wrapping an existing notation library, Otra engraves its own pages with the Bravura music font and plays every score through SoundFonts in the browser. The Mac app in development goes further, with a dedicated sound engine that hosts AU and VST3 instruments, so a score can sound like your studio.

Before: musicians had an easy editor that no longer ran and a drawer full of files nothing else could open. After: Otra Rescue is live and turns those files into MusicXML and MIDI in the browser, and the Otra editor writes, plays and prints scores ahead of launch, with pre-orders open.

Next comes the part I'm most excited about: putting Otra in front of the musicians who miss Encore most. The closed alpha has one simple bar: hear your first note within 30 seconds, and finish the core tasks without asking for help.

The score in the slides is Beethoven's Ode to Joy, a public-domain melody set for this case study. Encore is named only as the program Otra's users are leaving; no affiliation.