Developed in Java by Linc Media, Computing Japan's parent company, the program is accessible directly from the Web - users do not have to download or install any additional software. A key feature of the system is that users are able to save their work in either a private folder that only they can view or in a publicly accessible repository. This way, musicians can easily share notated melodies or experiment with changing the harmonies or instrumentation on other users' compositions. The music can also be played back in real-time over the Web. The servlet also handles all communication with the database, such as the storage and retrieval of compositions.
Musicians tend to learn most effectively by listening to and studying the work of other musicians.
NTT-X was in the process of building a greeting card website to support the launch of Sapporo's new Brau label and was looking for something a little out of the ordinary to distinguish the site from its Japanese competitors. When someone receives one of these cards, he or she clicks on a link that displays the card as a Web page and starts playing the song. While other greeting card sites at the time offered users the option of choosing from canned melodies to put in their cards, nobody else had given users the chance to compose original music to put in the greeting. Much of the work for this project centered around the creation of an intuitive Japanese-language interface for the editor. All instructions were in English, the interface was difficult to use, and, as we would discover in the coming weeks, the code was crawling with bugs.