Until today, creating/editing/publishing notations was limited to a few invited people. From today on, anyone who wants to create notation that can be viewed automatically in five south Indian language scripts, or as staff notation is welcome to use Patantara to do it. You don’t even have to create an account on patantara.com. Just sign in using Mozilla Persona using one of your existing accounts such as Gmail or Yahoo! mail.

In addition to the opening up of the site to all, this update marks one very important change to its functionality - documents created by one user may no longer be edited by another. Earlier, anyone could edit any document in the spirit of Wikipedia. Now, only a select group of “editors” have the permissions to edit documents created and published by others.

Here is a summary of what you can do on Patantara from today -

1. You can create notation documents and either keep them for private use, or publish them so they are visible to all via the catalog page.

2. Only you - the document’s creator, and those who’ve been given editing permissions may edit your document.

3. Documents created by users may embed audio recordings which they have themselves created, or have permission to share online.

4. An unpublished document created by a user is considered private and won’t be listed in the catalog. However, the creator can share a link to the document with whomever she wants and they’ll be able to view it.

5. Though other users may not edit your document, they can “copy” it. The “copy” step creates a personal copy that they can then proceed to edit. This is an important mechanism to permit the creation of multiple versions of a song - the various “patantaras”. It has been our vision from the start to embrace the rich diversity of Carnatic music by accommodating all patantaras on the site, instead of trying to promote one authoritative version. For this purpose, the notation display supports detailed descriptive notation. The system keeps track of the “copy” relationships for later analysis.

6. In case you accidentally erased parts of your document, do not worry. Your data is not lost. Patantara stores your document’s entire edit history.

A “document” on Patantara is just plain Markdown text with some special support for typesetting Carnatic music notation. Check out this blog post on how to typeset Carnatic music notation on Patantara.