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Messages - hmmueller

252
General Discussion / Re: Creating a .bat file to convert all files of a folder to NWCTXT.
Yes, in Windows, three-letters extension patterns match also longer  filename extensions. What you can do:
Code: [Select · Download]
for /F %i in ('dir /b *.nwc ^| findstr /e .nwc') do ...

Re the "goto EOF:", this is no real goto, but .bat's code for "return".

And my version with CALL and a separate block for the things to do is , I think, helpful if you want to execute more than one command in the loop. This is already helpful for adding some echo's for debugging. There is also a different method with parentheses
Code: [Select · Download]
for /F %i in (...) do (
   cmd1 
   cmd2 
   ...
)

Here are some links:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2423935/windows-command-line-search-for-exact-extension-with-dir
https://www.windows-commandline.com/windows-for-loop-examples/
https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1154761&seqNum=10

H.M.

// Edit: | in for loop needs a ^ in front of it. Aha.
253
General Discussion / Re: Creating a .bat file to convert all files of a folder to NWCTXT.
Put something like this in your .bat file:

Code: [Select · Download]
for %%F in (%1\*.nwc) do call :DoIt %%F %2
goto :EOF

:DoIt
echo %1 %2
goto :EOF

Instead of echo %1 %2, do your work there: %1 is the nwc file in the input folder, %2 the output folder. There are ways to create a "naked" filename from %1 ... I'll look them up, but my battery is running low ... so I'm in a hurry ....

H.M.
254
General Discussion / Re: Impossible composition, Beethoven style | Composed by AI | Musica ex Machina
Nice. I like m. 71! It sounds a little bit like the "pieces" I improvised on the piano when I was 16 - loud, fast, "Beethovenian", resulting in much headache for my mother (she was a musician - singer - and prone to headache) ...

One can see the patterns (harmonic; harmonic progressions; melodic; rhythmic) the machine has learned, and also some obvious ones (especially longer-range ones) it completely missed.

What I somehow wonder: Was this intended as a piano piece for one player? If so, doesn't the program have some idea of how large my hands are?

And: The 3/4 time signature is obviously and blatantly wrong for most parts (some have no rhythmic structure at all, there you can't tell). Did you add the 3/4 after the fact, or did the AI believe this was what it used when "composing"?

There is this article in the Guardian about a text written by an AI - it seems somewhat similar in that also there, one can see the "patterns that made it"; and how only huge editing gets you an acceptable result.

Of course, "doing things like XY" will be done by a machine at some point of time - just as power dredges completely replace people for excavating. Money to be made there, and "copying composers" will lose their jobs, just as all the (poor) shovelling people.

H.M.
255
General Discussion / Re: Piano Key Touch Playback Settings
I think this was when you asked "I need to make the piano sound (a lot) softer" some time back.

By definition of a real piano, there is no way to do this. You cannot go to a Bösendorfer grand and tell it "play softer" (with the keys pressed the same as before). The only thing that the piano player can change (besides timing and pedals, of course) is the velocity of the hammer striking the string.

With electronic equivalents, the rules could be arbitrarily different - but they mostly aren't, or aren't in a simple way: I.e., a computer simulation of a piano could do anything it likes with the MIDI commands it gets. But this behaviour is outside the realm of NWC - you need to use the right piano synthesizer. There are at least hundreds of piano synthesizers out there - from simple soundfonts (where you cannot change the softness, because they are typically recorded from a single instrument; but you can select the soundfont you like) to elaborate software "virtual instruments" that simulate the physics of a real piano, which have typically many parameters to adjust the overall sound - so you should be able to change softness with such a beast.

So, if you want to select the right softness, you need to find a synthesizer (be it a soundfont or a virtual instrument software) with the softness you want (on a software, you might - as I saied - be able to control it with some GUI controls). If you want to change the softness in the course of a piece, you either need to use a virtual instrument that can do that (typically, virtual instruments allow you to change all their parameters with NRPN messages), or you must change between various instruments (which would then be mapped to e.g. different soundfonts that you collected and selected beforehand) along the way with instrument changes.

Just as examples, on my Casio keyboard, I have about 10 different pianos from which I can select; on my small Yamaha synthesizer, I have more than 20 (I think), and I can (or could) control about 12 parameters of them - I never tried out all of them; and here on my laptop, I have some 10 or so piano soundfonts. Among all these, there are very soft ones, and very hard ones, and some that are soft in the lower range and harder in the upper range ... I select what I find necessary; and I could even change between them along a piece with NWC instrument changes - but I have not yet done that.

Summing up: Welcome to the infinite and, for me, horrifyingly large world of sound production. It can cost you a lifetime, and a fortune ...

H.M.
256
Announcements / Re: Forum/Server Upgraded (August 2020)
It works for me - I just tried it, and I could connect; and then online-sync Arpeggio.ms and another one.

Firewall problem? Rules of your local VPN (if you are in one - my company has had quite weird exclusions at times)?

H.M.
257
General Discussion / Re: Quarter note equals quarter note, etc.
Quote from: schnautza –
I'm not seeing any font that allows me to input [quarter note]=[half note]. I see the quarter note and half note symbols in several fonts, but these fonts seem to lack an "=" symbol.
In addition to Mike's TempoEquation.ms object, the XText.hmm object is designed to combine arbitrary text snippets from various fonts as a single object. The example file XTextExamples.nwctxt in that posting has a few examples of tempo equations.

H.M.
258
Tips & Tricks / Re: How to hide rests to prevent collisions with notes in layered staffs
Quote from: jakeness –
where to find |Rest Properties|Visibility (tab)
The properties dialog of anything (a rest, a note, a bar, ...) can always be opened like that (this is exactly like in all other programs in Windows - NWC is a very Windows-conformant program!):

(a) highlight the object, e.g. the rest - you do that by placing the cursor to the left of it and pressing Shift-right_arrow (right_arrow is the key to go right).
(b) then you either press Alt-Enter; or you press right-click on your mouse, which shows a small menu - the last entry is "Properties ...".

For a rest, you will there see a tab "Visibility" (you can either get there by clicking on it; or - also as always in Windows with tabs - by pressing Ctrl-Tab ... where Tab is the computer keyboard key with the two arrows on it).
And there, you see the "Show on printed" combobox, where you can select "Never".

I have added a small gif that shows what to do ...

H.M.
259
General Discussion / Re: Help with repeats
Main rule: Don't use local repeats. They are not actually (or at least often) used in musical notation and are more of a nice hack for special repetitions*, with the symbols made invisible. Try it with normal repeats.

H.M.

* There's one in Tchaikovsky's String Serenade in C, with an old "bis" ("[play] twice") annotation - see attachment.
260
General Discussion / Re: Is the NWC Viewer/Player available as a webpage
In the end, in modern times, sending MIDI files for playing has fallen out of fashion: Mainly because the sound is not controlled, as it is created at the receiver (and we all judge music also by its sound, even if we deny it). The same is true for NWC files - they are "just" "enhanced" MIDI files, from the standpoint of playing them. Thus, all go for MP3 (or Ogg, or the like).

But of course, for someone who likes or has to read the score in parallel to listening to the music, this is not enough. So the only way of doing it is making a video that shows the score; and plays the music at the same time. There are essentially two ways:
  • Use a screen-grabber (what all the gaming people do), and record a video of NWC playing the music;
  • or create a PDF score, and embed controls in the NWC file so that the PDF pages are flipped over at some convenient point - and then once again record the screen showing the flippant PDF-score with a screen-grabber, with the audio on the background. This shows off your professional printed score, but does not hint where the score is playing on each page; but someone reading along should be able to figure this out - otherwise, the whole reading exercise is useless anyway.
I have done both - it was quite a lot of work in each case; but at some point I'd like to fine-tune both approaches so that they become simple, run-of-the-mill processes. For the second one, I use(d) the MIDI-to-keystroke feature of Bome's "MIDI Translator Classic"; my (game-playing) son provided the screen-grabber whose name I forgot.

H.M.
262
Object Plugins / Re: Hairpin.ms (1.2)
Nice - now I can do something like in the attachment (prints nicely on A4 format; don't know about American page formats).

One small suggestion: Provide an explicit keyboard shortcut for the Closed Gap; the implicit C does not work (it is used by NWC's Class selector).

H.M.
263
Object Plugins / Re: Hairpin.ms (1.1)
Can I have one additional feature? - namely an "opening gap": In older scores, long hairpins wrapping over line breaks would start on subsequent lines already somewhat open ... Yes, a rare thing, but seems simple, and would make for a complete feature.

H.M.
265
Tips & Tricks / Re: User Object suggestion: filesystem metadata with option to be a watermark.
Quote from: Lawrie Pardy –
I had a look at the lua website and found a link to the lua binaries site ( http://luabinaries.sourceforge.net/ ) which in turn had a link to:
lua for Windows: https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows
which includes a bunch of libraries.  Might one of these libraries be of assistance in accessing the metadata and able to be installed to NWC?

Lua integration requires that the programmer of, in this case, NWC adds certain Lua libraries. If he doesn't do that, you can't use them. If he does it, he should (and, looking at NWC's object documentation, would and will) document it. From this, "it follows" that it's not possible to use any Lua file etc. functions.

The only way it could work differently is when their are bugs in the Lua systems and/or its integration into NWC. But we wouldn't want to base objects on bugs, would we?

H.M.
267
Tips & Tricks / Re: Sharp in stead of flat, how to change?
The cursor position is in the model - but whether it is stored before a user tool runs, I dont know. At least the .nwctxt file says:
Code: [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposer(2.751)
|Editor|ActiveStaff:1|CaretIndex:7|CaretPos:1
...

User tool: What I would expect is a tool that takes the key, including the tonic - which is in the model -
Code: [Select · Download]
|Key|Signature:Bb,Eb|Tonic:G
and uses this to apply the standard rules. E.g. g minor uses b flat and e flat, but f sharp for the note between f and g. B-flat, on the other hand, uses b flat and e flat and g flat. A tool could/should/might apply accidentals according to these rules, w/sh/couldn't it?

In other words: It does what "Audit Enharmonic Spellings" does, but correctly (i.e., also for minor keys); and, as additional feature, also for highlighted segments (only); and maybe also for a single note/chord, as Mike suggests. And maybe even with "overrides" = one can suppress the "Auditing" - by mis-using some notehead/note/chord property, or by adding some marker. I'd prefer the latter, as one might want to do multiple Audit runs while writing a piece; so the "overrides" should stay in place - but then, they should not have any other musical meaning.

... so we'd end up (once again?) with a small user object ("EnharmonicControlThingy") and an associated user tool ("Enharmonic Auditing considering keys and those EnharmonicControlThingies").

H.M.
268
General Discussion / Re: MIDI exporting bug?
Here is a zip file with 4 variants of diff output for the Hallelujah175/275 files (the CSV was created with the MIDICSV utilitiy found at fourmilab - the only such tool I know that works after Günther Nagler's even older one stopped working some Windowses ago). Maybe someone can see and explain the 1.75/2.75 differences with that ... I'm currently involved with other projects (and problems), therefore I don't dig into this ...

Edit: The c175_275.txt seems most useful/readable ...

H.M.
273
General Discussion / Re: Auto-Fill Empty Measures?
There's at least this tool ("Extend staff below with rests to cursor") I wrote somewhen. Don't know whether it does what you want - and I didn't do any updates since then

... I have just uploaded a version 0.2 which has been lying around on my computer, which does insert whole rests; however, as far as I can see, it will always count them as 4 beats. And the inserted rests are invisible (the original purpose for this tool is to help you compose, where you want to write snippets "later in the score", beforegoing back to an earlier position) - but you easily mark them and then make them visible, of course; which is also simple for many staves, as NWC keeps the selection when going to the next staff with PgDn.

... and I just found that the tool does the following: If you already have a staff of any time signature filled with full rests, and you invoke the tool, it will produce nice full rests on the staff below; this is actually a bug - but might be helpful in your case.

But the tool could be extended in various ways to make it more versatile ...

H.M.
274
Object Plugins / Re: NonFlowBar.hmm (0.1)
Thanks, Mike. Your "Edit" is what happened to me ... so I just left it like it was, as this whole object is a workaround anyway, I'd say.

H.M.
275
General Discussion / Re: Edit M4As?
REAPER. Full-blown DAW that can do anything, but costs nothing (with a wait when starting) or the likes of NWC or a little more. I've been using it for a decade or so now.

H.M.
276
Object Plugins / Re: NonFlowBar.hmm (0.1)
Hm.

The "reason" is that "brute number force": The object has a width of 1.2 (not 0 as most objects), and it draws its bars 1.85...3 to the left of the leftmost point. The reason for these magic numbers is that by this, it aligns "somewhat" with standard bars. I just tried to reduce the width to 0; and/or move the bars more to the right, so the anchor would to the left of the symbol - both attempts garbled up the appearance in the edit mode (but not in the display mode = F11; and probably not when printing). So my answer is "that way, it seems to work; with other numbers, I couldn't make it work" ... not really satisfying, but I'm somewhat hesitant to invest more into this "maybe somewhat hepful" object ...

H.M.
277
General Discussion / Re: 10000
This is one of the best stories I have heard - ever. Short, to the point, and totally zen. I will spread it. It's worth it.

H.M.
278
General Discussion / Re: 10000
For completeness, from the point of view of decimal numbers:


Even though I have used NWC for 21 years now (my first crank organ arrangement, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy", is from 1999), I don't know any names in those threads, except Fred Nachbaur.

Looking forward, when will 100000 be? Assuming roughly similar traffic (i.e., NWC is not going viral), some 9 times 24 = 216 years in the future, i.e., by year 2236, give or take a few (decades? centuries?).

H.M.
281
Object Plugins / NonFlowBar.hmm (0.1)
As an answer to more complicated flows (see e.g. this thread), here is a simple object that draws certain bar lines so that they do not have any "repetition logic". A desired control flow can then be created with tricky "endings", as e.g. Rick has shown in the thread linked above.

For connecting to non-flow bars in the following staff, the staff's "Bars Connected" flag is used. For connection with the staff above, one must check the object's "Connect upwards" flag. There is currently no StaffSig version for this, so one has to do it on every instance of the object - that could be improved, but with copy/pasting the bars around, it should not be really necessary (or is it?).

The object does not have any "bar logic", so there will be no line breaks at it; or a change of the bar counter. If this is desired, one can add hidden single bars before or after the object.

The symbols do not line up with "real" bars, but as I cannot see that one would want "flow logic" on one (visible) staff and "non-flow" on others, this should not be a problem.

One tiny flaw: Back-to-back close and open local repeats do not line up properly with font types MusikDingsSerif and MusikDingsSans - but as local repeats are not used that often, I did not repair this ... could be improved.

Positioning of the bar symbols is done "by brute number force" - if there is a better, "more analytic" way, which is maybe more resilient to some size changes (I did not do much testing), someone let me know so that I can change it.

H.M.
282
General Discussion / Re: Help! I am an illiterate in GuitarChords.ms!
Quote from: Mike Shawaluk –
I did send a private reply ... I can never tell when I am assuming too much prior knowledge.
Ah, I didn't know; or guess that someone did.

And yes, re the knowledge, it's mostly hard to tell. I started erring on the side of more detail because I think "others will read this too, and they might know even less" - as long as I feel that I am certain about some answer, which isn't always the case ... (for example, I still do not know which objects come pre-installed - just because I don't install Noteworthy any more, as it is already installed  :), and I'm too lazy/do not know where to look this up).

H.M.
283
General Discussion / Re: Repeat all
Quote from: Mike Shawaluk –
I've experimented with the preliminary object a bit, and I have a couple observations: ... Aside from these issues, this looks like a promising approach.
Thanks for reply ... it seems this will become even "kludgier" than I intended. Still, I'll try to complete it - will take a few days, as work (in a healthcare sector) is more than ever ...

H.M.
284
General Discussion / Re: Help! I am an illiterate in GuitarChords.ms!
Somehow we oversaw this ... the idea behind this is that you "add user objects" (in this case, "GuitarChord.ms" objects).

First of all, you must "install" the object. For this, you go to https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=9081.0 and, at the first "Code" part, click "Download". Open the downloaded file - and Noteworty will (might) tell you about the missing GuitarChord.ms object. If this is so, press "Ctrl-J" (or Tools -> Manage Objects), right click on the Object Type "GuitarChord.ms" and "Install Download". Now, you can use it.

For using it, go to the place in your score where you want to show a chord symbol. Press J and then G (to go near GuitarChord), go to "GuitarChord.ms" and press Enter (or doubleclick on GuitarChord.ms). Now, you will be asked questions about the chord - answer them and continue with Enter ... after the 3rd one, a chord symbol will appear!

If you need to change it, highlight it and press Alt-Enter - you get the "Notation Properties" dialog where you can change all the properties. For help, press the "?" in its right upper corner and then on some field (e.g. the text field near "Fingerings"), and you are shown information how to fill this field.

I hope that gets you up and running ...

H.M.
286
General Discussion / Re: Repeat all
Most probably, NWC's flow control is Turing complete  ;) - so there's no way to decide whether it does what you want or not ...
Seems like an exercise for a course in formal languages - which I took, decades ago, and was quite good at it. But not at ... well, you know.

Ok - not a helpful answer, I know.

H.M.
289
General Discussion / Re: different Time signature between Voice and piano: How to correct Bar positions?
Here is how I would do it - if the patterns are as regular. I suspect that's actually what Massenet thought: Triplets! - but why write all those triplets markers? - just put 12/8 in front of it.

So: Write the 12/8 staff as triplets on a C (hidden time signature!) staff, but suppress all the triplet symbols with a "Marker" - created on the keyboad with @ - where "Triplet" is selected; and Visibility is "Never". See attached example.

There might be places where the notation does not really fit - then, you have to fill up with invisible eighth breaks or the like.

(And this will not work if there are triplets on the 12/8 staff - which would be weird, but possible: In that case, you need to change the time signature to 12/8 at those places [or use it throughout]; and write the C staff with "lengthened" notes; the easiest way is adding a dot to each note/chord; and suppress it with "Extra Dot Spacing" set to -1. But this will get you into new troubles if you have dotted notes on the C staff ... which would then require those invisible breaks ... which will, then, make playback "wrong" [which would need separate tempo changes at the C-to-12/8-and-back changes anyway] ... etc.etc.)

H.M.
290
General Discussion / Re: Possible bug with Wing Dings font?
I'd say that you cannot use the WingDings font as the default "Staff Metrics/Notation Typeface" font - that font must be an "NWC" font like NWC2STDA or NWC2SwingDings - do you mean the latter? But with that, at least for me all is fine - see attached image (made after pressing F11 to see the rough print result; the second bar has"Use stem for articulations" set at all notes).

H.M.
292
Object Plugins / Re: BarCounter.hmm 0.5
I have uploaded version 0.5 in the initial posting, which should be without the MMR bugs. If anyone still finds problems with it, please let me know!

H.M.
294
Object Plugins / Re: BarCounter.hmm 0.4
Thanks again - I have just confirmed that it is a bug in my code - but I do not yet know what the problem is. I'll try to find it out!

H.M.
296
General Discussion / Re: interruptions to Noteworthy composer while working with files
I'm not really sure I understand your problem - do you, by "my music program", also mean Noteworthy? and do you mean by "deleting a screen" that you close it?

My first question is: Does this happen with your hands off the keyboard, i.e., "just by itself"? Or is your hand near the keyboard - and do you use a laptop?

The reason for my question: Some people (e.g. my wife ...) inadvertently touch the touchpad while using the keyboard, and then weird things start to happen; it seems difficult to change the hand position in such cases, as this is something "ingrained" in us. Might this or something similar be the problem? - because I have never heard or seen that NWC or standard Windows opens some dialog "just by itself".

... but I might be on a completely wrong track ...

H.M.
297
User Tools / Re: Copy and past measures of mutiple staves
Just as a note: I'm quite opposed to using measure numbers in a tool. Measure numbers are for musicians in the final product; but while editing, they are ill-defined, especially over multiple staves. Better, in my experience, are simple text markers put into the staves - they remain stable even when things are added or removed before them; and can easily by copied and removed by small helper tools.

H.M.
299
General Discussion / Re: Staves do not always get assigned to stereo channels properly.
If two or more staves are on the same channel, but have different MIDI options (volume/pan, but also e.g. MIDI patch instructions) chaos will ensue - i.e., it is then not clear which staff will "win".
So, make always sure that staves that have differing pan (or other MIDI) options go to different MIDI channels ...

... which might be (little) a hassle on the synthesizer (DAW) side, as you might have to setup different tracks with identical instruments/voices. I usually map each (NWC) staff to its own (DAW) track because that helps to avoid such confusions.

H.M.
300
General Discussion / Re: Producing a "jazzy" feel
Quote from: Lawrie Pardy –
this proposed object...
Would it maybe be able to do the tempo adjustments too?
No chance, I'd say. The best one could do is to provide a user tool which places the tempo variations on a selected separate staff. If the tool is genius, it could
* check that at some beat, there are no eighths, but there's a triplet - and then not add  the swing tempo changes in that quarter, but a single tempo for all of it (a measure that contains a triplet in on voice/staff and two "swingy" eighths in/on another would stump the tool, of course, as it would each of us ... NWC can't do this).
* look for explicit manual tempo variations on some staff and modify the computed swing tempo entries accordingly (with the additional problem that having two different tempos at the same instant in NWC produces an indeterministic result - so, one should probably add a 1/128 break before the inserted tempo change so that it always "wins");
* and, finally, mark its added tempo variations in such a way that they can be removed easily ...

I have not at all thought this through, so maybe there are different and much better possibilities; but this is what I'd assume one encounters when trying to play that swingy thing.

(And, please, if someone does this play thing, do not assume that the "swing ratio" is always 2:1 - it might also be 60:40 or 55:45; and it might change, so that ratio would have to be an option - even though the printed symbol always claims this "triplet ratio").

... just my destructive 2 cents ...

H.M.

P.S. Should I write "shuffle" instead of "swing"? - I think that would be the more correct term ...