What is Mosaic?

Quote from Wikipedia:

Mosaic is a now abandoned software program for producing music originally appearing as Professional Composer. Mark of the Unicorn, the company that produced the software, decided to update Professional Composer and the result was Mosaic. No media release was ever produced by the company about Mosaic's demise and the product was dropped. Several factors can be theorized: Sibelius and Finale were the competitor notation packages; they were developed for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. Mosaic was only available for Macintosh computers and thus Sibelius and Finale had far larger market opportunities.

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The programming team at Mark of the Unicom has spent the last three years trying to create a music-notation and -publishing program that can satisfy everyone from novice songwriters to professional music copyists. Amazingly, Composer’s Mosaic meets this goal. It’s automatic enough to allow novices to get notes on paper easily, but it additionally provides state-of-the-art tools for manipulating subtle details. And unlike Mark of the Unicorn’s previous notation program. Professional Composer, Composer’s Mosaic is very stable — it supports multiple files: works with all Macintosh/monitor combinations; is compatible with fonts, extensions, and control panels; and offers complete System 7 support.

Central to Mosaic's power is the concept of voice. A voice is a part or phrase that you can isolate and reuse on different staves (assigning it to various transpositions if you like). You can also layer multiple voices on a single staff.

Mosaic imports MIDI channels as voices and exports voices to MIDI channels for seamless integration with sequencing programs — the easiest way yet to make MIDI data show up as the right notes.

In addition to the ability to import MIDI files and live MIDI data painlessly. Mosaic has a click-and-drag WYSIWYG interface that makes it easy to enter notes and other musical elements from movable palettes directly onto staves — with unlimited Undo capabilities to help you recover from mistakes. Mosaic's multiple views make it easy to view the same piece as a score, its parts, or a page layout, and part generation from scores is automatic.

Mosaic also offers templates that behave like musical “style sheets,” autolayout preferences, easy text placement, and even a new lyric window. Lyrics can be typed in this window, formatted, and then applied to as many voices as you desire.

Additional sophisticated features include cross-staff beaming, configurable palette symbols, unlimited symbol placement, any number of staves (depending on memory), adjustable note-stem length, flexible measure numbering, and complex meters. And for ultimate tweaking flexibility, anything you've entered can be dragged to a new location.

By the time you read this, version 1.1 of Mosaic will be available. This version wi11 have full compatibility with Professional Composer files (the current version can read only parts of Composer files), and future versions will reflect Mark of the Unicorn's efforts to become highly responsive to user requests, incorporating features such as a draw environment for creating nonstandard symbols. Because Mosaic is easy to modify and upgrade, we expect it to continue to improve.

Gruberman, Ken. (October 1992). Composer's Mosaic. MacUser. (pgs. 85-86).

Download Mosaic for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K / PPC

Mac OS 7.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

At least 2MB of free RAM (recommended 5MB or more depending on your composition)

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver