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General Discussion / Just a weekend story
At hand:
- The full printed 72-page score ("score F") for a small orchestra (strings, winds, harp [with important segments], percussion) of a modern mass for SATB choir;
- also, a printed 40-page condensed score ("score P") for piano and SATB;
- finally, 40-page choir's score (only) in our own modified version for SSAB choir, written with Capella score editor ("score C"). This was created painstakingly and slowly by a colleague, reviewed and edited multiple times by our conductor, formatted by me to get a somewhat professional layout; thus, it deviates from the previous scores at quite a lot of places.
Todo - overdue, i.e. quickly:
- A full score for instruments strings and piano and our SSAB voices; and a piano score.
The idea is that the piano plays the voices from score F except the strings. Maybe half of it will come from the harp, some segments also from clarinets and flutes, rest "as necessary"; much copy-and-paste should be nice to get a rough result quickly.
First idea: Capella Scan (music scanning software for Capella) to scan both scores F and P, then append the string and harp and a few wind staves from score F to the existing Capella score C. Scans with Capella Scan looked good; but copying of full staves betwen scores crashed (the most uptodate version) Capella, and line-by-line copying of 72 pages times 4...5 staves = more tha 300 copy-pastes, with probably more thana handful of pasting errors thrown in, is not what I had in mind for just creating the raw version.
What did work, starting on Saturday morning:
1. Scanning scores F and P into PDFs.
2. Run the PDFs through Audiveris unattended and saving as MusicXML (but the lyrics got lost - I did not succeed in installing the necessary Tesseract OCR files).
3. Import into MuseScore 4 and re-export as MusicXML roughed out many many edges.
4. NWCConvertor then created NWCTXT files ready to be edited without a hitch.
5. A good text editor (I use UltraEdit) and some regular expression magic converted or removed many funny things (mostly invisible rests that came from Audiveris and MuseScore to even out measure lengths) in the NWCTXT files (I LOVE a line-based text format ... for this sort of jobs)
6. Copy-paste of the lyrics out of Capella did work; however, the text editor and its regexps were needed again to replace Capella's somewhat weird lyrics formatting to get simple NWC-like lyrics.
From there on, I did direct editing in NWC: Copy-pasting staves (all the strings, harp!) or parts of staves (clarinets!), and then also writing of a few hundred new measures. On Saturday evening, I attended another choir's concert. On Sunday at 9am, I continued; and at noon, I was done with writing out the notes. The standard process of adding sound and listening to the voices revealed quite a few missing clefs and accidentals - but by 3pm or so all sounded fine. Formatting for nice page boundaries took another two hours, and at 5pm, I sent out the full director's score.
Creating the piano scores from the same NWC score files took a few hours today - I use my PrintConfiguration.hmm objects extensively: It's really easy to quickly create voice scores (in this case, for piano with a cue staff) as well as re-create the full scores (because, of course, I found quite a few more quirks during this).
I'm now waiting for review remarks from the conductor and the piano player. After maybe two or at most three more turnovers, we can then print and bind the 70 pages for the conductor; and print the 15 piano pages.
H.M.