This is an interesting discussion. Here is a contribution, which I would expect should get its one vote counted, neither more nor less.
I would expect muted staves to generate no midi events at all, whether to the midi port or an exported midi file, but neither muting nor hiding removes a staff from the score, and so long as things like tempi and fermatas are permitted on more than one staff, muting a staff should not make these ineffective. Perhaps a new sequester or recuse attribute could make everyone happy. Of course, muting a visible staff should not affect the note chase.
The three ways to generate a stuck note represent, I think, only two different cases. The first two involve two different notes, which happen to lie on the same staff line. The second note should sound, but doesn't. The first note and its tie then represent a musical illegality. A tie is legitimate only if an appropriate target exists without a time gap intervening. I would go so far as to say the tie attribute should be automatically removed if the target note is deleted, but under the current user interface, this would create a problem entering a note, which will later get an eligible target. I personally always go back and add the ties after all notes to be tied into one group are entered, but I would hardly want to force anyone else to do this, so I would ask that an illegal tie be flagged with an otherwise unavailable highlight color or made to blink or be given some such marker, and be ignored during playback. The third case should not present a problem if muted notes generate only a note off event at the proper time, which is apparently not the case. For this reason they certainly should not be treated as rests.
Muting a grace note should, I think, be just like muting any other note; no aspect of the surrounding notes should change. A grace note interpreted as beginning before the beat need steal no time from any other note, but that interpretation needs a new attribute, probably at all of the score, staff, and note levels. Again, this new feature could make everyone happy.
Finally, no input to a program should produce a catastrophic failure, certainly not an illegal page fault, but probably not even a stuck note. When I was attending IBM SHARE meetings, we all got hot under the collar when the answer was "correct code does not encounter the problem". No construct which has a clear meaning, such as a tie to a muted note, should have serious problems it causes ignored because "no one would want to use it".
This could be solved cleanly if the notes in a chord could be separately given all attributes that make musical sense to be separate for the notes of a chord. (Staccato might not make sense, but tie/slur direction definitely would.)
The example also shows an inconsistency in that the right ends of the ties don't depend on where their respective note heads are while the left ends do. Seems that either both or neither should be given this "optimization".
BTW, I have tried many combinations and do not find a similar problem for slurs.
There is no need to speculate. Dynamics are single characters in the system font, because they are traditionally printed with a sort of kerning not available to separate letters in most fonts. The Marcato is in Staff Italic.
Here is a more nearly complete nwctxt file than provided above. The mismatched barlines in the repeat section are deliberate, constituting a test that NoteWorthy passed by not getting lost. The file exports and re-imports without loss or change.
Bill, you are awfully sensitive if you find half a sentence a lecture. Besides, read what you wrote:
Quote
I have not published music, but I doubt that industry is substantially different from the book-publishing world… [emphasis added]
And contemplate the advice of Wittgenstein "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (Tractatus 7)
You are right about one thing, I will never understand the motivation of someone who would deny others their desires merely because they want something he does not want.
In case you haven't already noticed, I am a devotee of putting each voice on its own staff and layering. This gives total control, and when neat printing is desired, suppressing redundant rests and putting in the extra note space sometimes needed when voices cross is tedious but straightforward. I recognize the fossil dinosaur in split stem, split duration and rest chords, and was thankful for the invention of layering, which came along just when I really started to need it, particularly for putting in complex piano accompaniments.
However you view the details of the cause of the origin of this thread, understanding why a behavior occurs does not make it not a bug. Musically synonymous constructs must be treated consistently. If your expectation that this will never be fixed is true, it won't affect my use of NoteWorthy, as I don't use the construct that is failing here, but again this doesn't make it not a bug.
I can and do agree that workarounds are sometimes a necessary stopgap, but that doesn't mean that generating them is the right way to go. My first priority, if not always my first action, is to get deficiencies properly defined and documented. It's what I wanted my customers to do when I was making my living developing software, and I think it's perfectly appropriate here.
NoteWorthy Version 2 will, with a little graphic editing to put in titles and orchestral brackets, produce printouts that don't immediately strike the eye as crude, and even Version 1.75 produces something perfectly usable as intermediate drafts when working on a piece. But what is acceptable in private and for limited distribution just doesn't hack it when you want to publish. If you don't know for yourself, just trust me on this one.
The same problem happened when I tried to print the "NWCTXT complete example file", in that print preview showed the title info and the first page was numbered "3", but when it was actually printed, the title info got lost and the page was numbered "5". Certainly, however the choice of when to print title info is made, the print preview and actual printout should match.
Please, how is recognizing a genuine fault "dissing" NoteWorthy? How does claiming that the potential existence of an ambiguity, admitted not to be present here, somehow make reacting differently to musically synonymous input just fine and dandy? I find NoteWorthy the only program available that even vaguely meets the need for a user controllable vocal practice aid. I would like to see it improved, and do not understand those who see a polite request to have an obvious bug fixed as a demand for perfection, which it most certainly is not.
Finally we are getting down to something of substance, both in terms of NoteWorthy and my "attitude". I can assure you all that with the slightest hint about just what you object to, I will soon be able to avoid people's toes altogether and not just their corns.
I am not "afraid" of anything my users will do, and in fact encourage them to become adept at using the tools I give them. I have a question for all of the "hidden trickery" party, not just Mr. Ashworth, who was kind enough just now to give me a reasoned reply. Why do you want your work hidden? I hide the accompaniment only so that there will be more room on the screen for my singer's parts, and expect them to be aware of and change the accompaniment when needed, if only to correct the balance of volume for their particular sound hardware. I have all along been objecting only to the idea that the ability to cobble together something that sounds the way you want it to but is so ugly it needs to be hidden behind a pretty but muted staff gives the developers an excuse (sometimes it sounds like "a good reason") to deny the user community the tools that would let the real nitty gritty be presentable. As far as NoteWorthy becoming a truly serious fine engraving program, the LilyPond project, if it reaches its potential, which is still an open question, will surely eclipse not only NoteWorthy but Finale, Sibelius and every possible past and future bits of music software except, possibly, a clone of itself run by a different group of people. I will give my thought on this fuller expression in a thread of its own.
Meanwhile, back to the original topic of this thread. Chords in NoteWorthy are problematic, and there are several current threads concerning difficulties created by the way they are handled. This thread concerns a situation where the length of a measure as calculated by NoteWorthy (and please, let's handle the question of whether NoteWorthy should calculate the length of a measure in its own thread) differs according to whether a note is represented by a single half note or two tied quarter notes. Would anyone care to defend the position that this behavior is correct and should not be changed? Would anyone care to defend the position that even though this behavior is incorrect it should not be corrected? Would anyone care to defend the position that though the behavior should be corrected, the developer(s) are fully entitled to sit on it forever? I await your answer(s).
How dense can one be? After I describe just how I make staves hidden and how they will not remain hidden when a user gets hold of them and "unhides" them, you still think you are making a contribution by giving a condescending description of how to do what I just said I have been doing all along?
As for the appearance of NoteWorthy Version One scores, they were perfectly useful, at least if one put in hairpins and orchestral brackets by hand and ignored the always flat ties and slurs, among many other things, but they were definitely not high quality engravings. If that satisfies you, so be it. But don't put down anyone who wants something better, it only makes you look silly.
Your earlier confusion (in another thread) among invisible objects, layered staves, and hidden staves comes to mind. Are you using hidden staves for playback yet? Or, as in so many of the suggestions we've made, are you simply rejecting them out of hand?
Whoa. Here I must cry foul. There is not and never was any confusion in my mind about various kinds of hidden stuff. I merely pointed out that when you give a customer a NoteWorthy file (not a printout or a generated midi file or a wma or mp3 file) and he has a fully functional NoteWorthy program (not the Reader), then unless there is an undocumented password lock on individual bits of notation, nothing whatever can be hidden from him if he chooses to use the contents dialogue box under page setup. Hidden notation, though it doesn't print, appears on screen in a sort of goldish highlight. And I do routinely exclude the accompaniment from display on most of my distributed files. I am not "dismissing" anything, out of hand or otherwise, but rather pointing out that having a diverse audience for what I produce makes any use of obscure trickery or attempt to "hide" a lack in NoteWorthy by having separate printing and playback staves completely futile.
As to my language, I am not attacking any individual in this forum or for that matter NoteWorthy itself, but merely calling a spade a spade. NoteWorthy Version 1 would have been a joke as a serious music-engraving program, but as far as I can see, no such claim was ever made. I believe NW1 was intended to give composers and arrangers a quick way of hearing approximately what their music sounded like without hiring an orchestra or straining their keyboard skills. NW2 seems to be trying to make it as a serious engraver, but with such an obvious in your face "property" as its handling of the orchestral staff attribute, it can hardly avoid remaining a joke.
Thanks for pointing to the "options" button under "AutoFormat" under the "format" dropdown menu. That still leaves font substitution, but more to the point I was trying to point out that sometimes there are reasons for using a program that have nothing to do with its quality. In the case of Word, it is that it is a defacto standard. In the case of NoteWorthy they are its superior rendering of files into sound linked to a note chase and the tiny size of its binary files. Still, I would like to print scores which will not be dismissed as "some computer printout".
Sigh, neither do you. It has nothing to do with what rev my customers are using, but rather that they are real people using what I produce for a real purpose. I could find a dozen places in this forum where some of you glory in being snide, or threaten fire and brimstone if… but what's the point?
Why the vitriol? Show me where I have been abusive, demeaning, obscene, or even just "snide". I have previously written at great length just why I cannot use a result based on obscure trickery any more than a mother could use a toy box full of lead painted objects with tiny but powerful magnets loosely glued to them just because its exterior is copasetic. Besides, both I and the originator of this thread displayed our own fully satisfactory solutions (he using tied quarter notes and I using staff overlay) long before the trickery was posted. On the other hand, much of the discussion about how written music should be interpreted was very useful, but remember that my opinion is just as valid as yours. In the end, though, Eric, or the organization he fronts for, must make the final decision.
It also seems that my fear of being thought patronizing lead me to make some of my comments too terse. "Music Publisher" is a different beast than Music Publisher 5/6, far more different than NW1 and NW2. My quote was from the Braeburn Software web site and a direct response to what I take to be unfair criticism of NoteWorthy. It was meant as a sincere suggestion. As far as Microsoft Word goes, I do turn off "check spelling and grammar while typing", but things like automatic capitalization after a period, translation of the "th" after a digit to superscripts, conversion of things that look like url's and email addresses to hyperlinks, automatic substitution of fonts and many other things cannot be turned off. If I were using a word processor only to produce printouts I would use the Windows 98 vintage Corel WordPerfect 7, which gives the user total information and control, but since I must usually distribute my writings as e-mail attachments, I must put up with the effort of undoing much of the automatic formatting done by Microsoft Word.
Finally, while an apology is better than not getting one, it would be best to act so that none is needed.
The user tool is editing the nwctext, just not by hand. I was asking for a "pure NoteWorthy" solution that would apply to 1.75, which is, after all, what I have to get my scores into for distribution to the singers in my club.
NoteWorthy has no choice; it must understand the music or it can't play it or output MIDI. I agree with William Ashworth that as you go to historical "deep time" there is indeed some variation in how music was read, but a tool like NoteWorthy is hard enough pressed to come up with one consistent reading, and this one reading must be determined by a panel (please, not a "committee") of truly and deeply educated musicians, not a programmer who also dabbles in music or a bunch of gadflies, and on this topic I would include myself in their number. When I said there was no ambiguity, I really should have said that this was based on only five keyboard players that I know well, and applied to "standard" music of the 18th through mid 20th century.
As far as not wanting a word processor to criticize spelling and grammar, Microsoft Word does exactly this, and not all of what it does can be turned off. Yet millions of people, like me, put up with it. If you want a music processor that "doesn't argue with you", try
Quote
Music Notation Software written by musicians for musicians.
Music Publisher is a professional quality music notation system for all 32-bit Windows platforms. Focussed entirely on the printed page it is above all a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get visual system. The philosophy of Music Publisher is that it is simply a replacement for pencil and paper. If you want a particular effect on your score which "breaks" the rules of music then Music Publisher will not argue! Above all it produces the notation you want to see and does not impose its own rules.
Of course, it can't play the music.
I too use chords for simple divisi which all have the same rhythm. When they don't all have the same rhythm, this usually turns out to really be TTTBB or TTTBBB or even TTTTBBBB, which really want a staff per voice, however many fewer end up on the printed page.
On further investigation, this problem occurs in version 1.75 also. As has here been mentioned, layering was invented specifically because the restrictions on what note lengths (and rests for that matter) can be combined into a chord makes putting more than one independent voice on a staff always difficult and mostly impossible. The first fix I would recommend would be to have a small pamphlet written on the subject "How to use NoteWorthy musically.", as opposed to just what the commands and keystrokes will do in their own little corners. Layering is not "a small price to pay", it is the mechanism provided for this function. Second, while there may be no simple and obvious algorithm for saying when a note in a multi-voice staff should begin, there seems to be no ambiguity to serious and educated keyboard players how music should be read. If the standard interpretation of a measure would depend on stem direction, then this is what NoteWorthy must do. Here, the solution must involve adding serious musicians to the programmer(s?) at NoteWorthy software.
Finally, a question for Rick G. How would you create your "fix" using only the standard keystroke/mouse facilities of NoteWorthy, rather than editing the nwtext file? Select the note and it comes up as having no duration value.
The extended discussion here about hidden rests and digital whiteout ignores the simple fact that staff 3 and staff 4 (staves 1 and 2 are irrelevant) are musically synonymous and should be interpreted and played identically. Carl is not trying to stuff four beats into a three beat measure. NoteWorthy is refusing to recognize that the stem up quarter note in the ¾ measure should begin in the middle of the stem down half note. Breaking up the half note into two tied quarter notes gives the rendering engine a chance to recognize the presence of the final stem up quarter note before it's too late to do anything about it, but all events need to be recognized when they occur, not after some previous event is finished.
First, I never would consider a singer more computer savvy than I am "competition". On the other hand, he is the last person to whom I would want to explain why I used an ugly kludge to get a desired result.
If you read back to my comment about adding braces and brackets graphically, you will see that I can get all the results in the previous post by Mr. Alberga just by setting no staff to orchestral, and invisibly fixing things in the print image. Please note also, that only the Thompson_Four_Saints.jpg actually uses a grand staff. The first two use the curly brace in the same way that the third uses nested brackets, notation I have never seen for the obvious reason that the only time I look at a full orchestral score is when I need to take an opera or oratorio chorus and boil it down to four voices and something my conductor can turn into a piano accompaniment. I don't pretend to be anything but an advocate for my subspecialty.
As far as "backward compatibility" goes, I think it very unlikely that fixing this problem would change the result of a successful kludge, except to make it unnecessary. I leave it to the usual gadflies to provide a counterexample.
You guys can argue about special cases and the possibility someone may want to do a "nonstandard" thing (as far as standards exist) all you want. I just want to get the thing to work for 85% of the cases that need orchestral braces instead of the 0.1% that get covered now. (A two staff barbershop rendering is got right, finials and all, but this victory is tempered by the fact that barbershop is usually sung from memory.)
Sorry about the deep end, and I agree control over connecting bar lines would be good, but if you think about it there is no need for lower and upper orchestral staff attributes. Any number of staves (including one only) can be marked orchestral, and any number of staves between be unmarked. Then all raw ends get decorated, and the direction of curve is obvious from the context. That "backward compatibility" need not really be an issue here is one sign (though not a defining one) that the current behavior is a bug.
Lawrie,
VanBasco does not display music notation, and helping the less musically trained singer learn to read is a big part of my objective.
I am not irritated at the "intricacies" of NoteWorthy, which is about the simplest music editor around to use. It's just that I have singers [snark alert] almost as clueless as some of the contributors to this forum, through my conductor (a sophisticated trained musician who earns his keep as a computer analyst), to the group's floating voice leader who sings any voice at sight. And although he hasn't shown up yet, I must be ready to face the singer even more computer savvy than I am, so I want everything neat and tidy.
You guys have gone off the deep end here. The current dialogue box is sufficient for a basic but correct implementation of the orchestral brace. The rules are; 1) all and only those staves marked orchestral have the extra line at the left, 2) adjacent orchestral staves are connected, both at the left and by bar lines for the rest of the system, 3) loose ends get finials. If you must have orchestral braces overlap a grand staff, which I have never seen in any score I have read, you would need extra windows or attributes, but I say leave it out. Nested orchestral braces are used, but I would call that an advanced feature for the wish list.
In answer to those who have suggested that I look at xxx, here is a reply, not really part of the thread.
I hit on NoteWorthy very quickly, but over the past seven years, I have examined the following audio/music packages.
Awave Studio – Accepts about 200 audio formats (.wav, .mp3, .wma, .midi, numerous midi instrument fonts, proprietary sound card instrument fonts, etc.) and will translate any to the about 100 formats it knows how to write. Acts as a midi sequence editor and sound font creator/editor. Will do wave table rendering of midi files into .wav files. Does not have a music notation display format.
GNMIDI – An alternative midi file editor. Will save midi file as a readable text file, print a midi file as a score sheet, write it as a karaoke file, enter a new midi file from the PC keyboard and generate cell phone ring tone files among many other functions.
Igor engraver – Full function professional music engraver. Too expensive
Lime – Very early music engraver effort started at university of Illinois and kept up to date. Manual is still a good reference on music notation and engraving. Display format is page oriented and not suitable for my purposes.
MIDI Editor – Primarily oriented toward use with external midi instruments by YAMAHA, ROLAND, KORG, KAWAI, etc.
Music MasterWorks – Good for entering new music. Will attempt to notate from microphone or wav file, or compare mic input with score. Scrolling display is cluttered and printout very primitive.
Music Publisher – A pure graphical editor. Does not understand music or provide playback. Claims to be descended from a DOS program called "Note Worthy".
Music Ease – A lot like NoteWorthy in style but much more complete. Designed to interface directly with Sharp Eye. Expensive.
Personal Composer – Full featured engraver with playback. Allows direct control of graphic page layout. User control of enharmonic interpretation. Wonderful set of formatting tools, but interprets them graphically only; there is no check that output makes musical sense. Scrolls by measure rather than by note.
Finale – At least Finale PrintMusic® required to get scrolling, currently available version requires Windows XP. Price at $100 per copy thinkable for me, but probably too high for my singers.
Sibelius – Hideously expensive. Basic product needs costly add-ons to make it fit for my use. Installing Scorch trashed my font directory; scrolls but no note chase.
vanBasco's Karaoke Player – Intriguing, especially as it's freeware. But NoteWorthy minus just a couple of bugs would be exactly what I want, so this would be a distant second choice.
NoteWorthy player – Adding enough to this to make it minimally useful to me would make it essentially full NoteWorthy. Besides, if my push my guys to buy legit copies of NW1 (most just use the evaluation version), that would help pay for some of the improvements that I really want, as well as help push NW2 out the door.
Today I will be addressing core topics, not individuals, so please do not feel slighted if you don't see a reply to a comment of yours here.
As to what I am trying to do with NoteWorthy. I am using it in a live professional environment to provide practice aids for home study to two choral societies. I issue, by e-mail, packets of around eighteen works averaging ten to twelve pages each in four choir voices and piano accompaniment, which often requires two staves per hand. The singers must edit their personal copies to get a proper balance of volume out of the various staves, both because there are two incompatible "standards" for interpreting the midi velocity attribute (in synthesized and wave table implementations, with much variation even within a group) and because each singer will want a different balance between his voice and the others, perhaps starting with the others muted, then quieter than his, then all at full volume and finally, especially for quartet singers, his own voice muted while the others sing out, as he will experience in performance. To slow faster works for initial practice sessions, the tempo must be adjusted by edit, as there is no tempo slider on the tool bar (that being the one and only advantage Sibelius has over NoteWorthy), and in songs with major tempo changes mid work, the singer must master NoteWorthy enough to find and change embedded tempo indications, which sounds trivial, but often causes trouble. More advanced singers will want to add breath marks and dynamics, which I cannot put in the distribution because they aren't decided until rehearsals are well underway, as well as correct errors, both mine and those in the original scores I work from. I routinely exclude accompaniment staves from the display, but they pop up anyway in the mute list, and besides, I cannot control what a customer who discovers the page setup button does with it. It is in this sense that I said there is really no such thing as a hidden staff.
I am in no way attacking either NoteWorthy or Eric. I am only trying to raise the profile of a bug that is surely causing lost sales for this program. A professional musician observing the result of his choosing "orchestral" for a staff would probably throw up his hands in disgust and move on to the next candidate without discovering how nearly ideal NoteWorthy already is. And if the product sinks, I won't get any of my suggestions for improvement, which I have hardly started to mention, implemented.
It is true that, although I have been working with NoteWorthy for seven years, I have only just begun to wade through the forums and scriptorium, but they are full of irrelevant jokes and comments like "I don't know where Eric got his "spec" from, but he must have gotten it from somewhere, so don't criticize what he does." Or the even more frequent "I recall seeing x somewhere but I'm too lazy to look it up." These add nothing to the discussion, and make for slow going. And while sneaky tricks may be amusing for those playing with NoteWorthy or using it to format their own compositions, for me they are mostly useless.
I have been unfocused, and have mentioned some difficulties with the user interface that don't belong in this thread, for which I apologize. I will not further comment on them until they appear in their own threads, except to say that even minor problems become significant when, as happened to me at the end of August, one has thirty seven pieces of music to NoteWorthyize in three weeks. I checked out the suggestion that in NW2, notes of varying time values could be forced to a common value with a single keystroke, but the tool bar still grays out the note length toolbar buttons, so the problem is only half fixed, and this introduces a bug in that the product is now inconsistent with itself.
The suggested MXML translator requires a fourteen hour download of net frameworks for Windows 98SE, and while I am in the process of converting to XP professional, that will take some time, and I suspect it will need the download too. The user tools require learning PHP, which is significant even for a multi-lingual former professional, and my time is limited. Also, for my purposes I must strip most dynamic and tempo markings out of the .nwc files anyway (I am building a skeleton outline of the music containing only the basic tones and rhythms for musicians to learn the notes from), so if the spelling and triplet detection problems were fixed, a midi file would contain most of what I need.
Finally, everything I do must be compatible with NW1, as this is all that is available to my customers. I considered distributing the beta to them under the strictures that they must make all complaints and comments to me and that they promise ; ) to buy the product when it came out, but for a lot of reasons this is a bad idea. If I don't hear from Eric on this in the next two weeks, I will reconsider the issue and probably not do it, but it may end up as the least of many evils.
Debugging means removing bugs from programs. A bug is unexpected and undesirable behaviour by a program.
Occasionally there is a formal specification that the program is required to follow, in which case a bug is a failure to follow the spec. More frequently the program specification is informal, in which case people may disagree as to whether a particular program behaviour is in fact a bug or not.
Mr. Taylor is a GNU honcho, which is why he could say "occasionally". Back when I was working in the field, a customer who would not accept having a formal spec would be avoided like the plague. In the case of NoteWorthy, the spec is a little less than formal, but is contained in the thousands of scores one can find published by commercial printing houses employing professional engravers. Sure there are unsettled fringes, but the specific point at question is not among them.
Also, your link was broken. Ever think of using cut and paste to avoid typos?
"William Ashworth, I don't get it. Where does this attitude that you can't ever possibly be wrong come from?"
Lawrie,
You got the reference to the unknown authority you assume Eric to have worked from correctly. If you are not embarrassed by throwing such a thing out in defense of someone who did not ask for your help, you should be. I agree that Eric is unlikely to join the forum on this; he will most likely either continue to ignore the issue or fix it silently.
You apparently have never sent an .nwc file to a non-computer savvy singer. All the things that are "hidden" in the printout just hang out in a different color. It is the NoteWorthy file that is my product, and I must expect my customers to further edit it, so hidden staves are also not really hidden. Trickery of any kind would be fatal to this enterprise.
Tony,
I consider myself very lucky to have hit on NoteWorthy so quickly. And I am not criticizing it, but asking for an improvement to a "feature" which has been documented as improved between NW1 and NW2, but in fact has not been fixed.
How utterly careless of me not to have emphasized even more that my differences with NoteWorthy are in the nature of a lover's quarrel. Who else would enter the Augean Stables and attack the knot of seagull guano creating a hazard at the door, which the combined rivers Alpheus and Peneus could not wash away? For another thing, who would buy a used car, however well restored cosmetically, offered with five unevenly bald tires? Is this Eric person I keep hearing about trying to avoid having to pay income tax on his earnings from Noteworthy?
About bugs. The industry I refer to is the one in which I worked from 1965 to 1996. I have never been in a real life situation where the programmer's intentions count for diddelysquat. However intended a program behavior may have been, if it is unsatisfactory to the customer, and especially if it conflicts with a requirement beyond the control of the immediate customer, the program has a bug. Surprise has nothing to do with it. When, during one of the Mercury space flights, the flight computer became overloaded, it stopped displaying engineering data until the more essential flight control tasks were complete, behavior that was unplanned for, and in fact wildly unexpected, but certainly not a bug.
And now for some social chat.
Cyril
Hurrah! At last someone who remembers farther back than I do. I can only claim to have been in the same room as a Bendix G15, and that was when I interviewed for a summer job (there were no unpaid interns in those days). I did some very minor rewiring of a 407 tabulating machine, but couldn't do very much as the machine was used as a punch card printer and had most of it's registers removed.
Tony
I repeat again that I find NoteWorthy extremely useful 99 and 44/100 percent of the time. I hit on it in January 2004 (Rev 1.75a) April 2000 (Rev 1.55b) after looking at only five other music editors and never looked any farther, except to briefly review Sibelius Scorch as used by another Glee Club in my city. It's Sibelius Scorch is a diamond studded gold watch with rusty works. (I try not to say anything I can't confirm, so I accepted the oldest version on my current computer as the start of my use of NoteWorthy, but I just found my distripution package, and so make the correction. Also, I am not being critical of NoteWorthy as compared to other music software, but rather pointing out a nit which I, as a software manager would never have let any of my people get away with.)
Lawrie
If you can't respond to the general tenor of my remarks, at least reply to full sentences. I never said NoteWorthy as a whole is unacceptable, only it's way of handling the Orchestral Staff Property.
You got me backwards. It's the sound that's important, and for distribution to forty or more choristers of varying sophistication, anything tricky would only cause problems.
In my experience, audit enharmonic spelling gives the same results as midi input conversion, as it should. It's just that whoever wrote the code apparently wasn't a musician. Enharmonic spelling is not totally straightforward and there are cases where a composer will shift the spelling of a note to indicate it's changed function in the harmony, but I am told by my conductor that NoteWorthy just plane gets many unambiguous cases wrong.
Look at a couple of hundred scores and find one that does it NoteWorthy's way (an orchestral brace extending through the piano grand staff with a finial at the top but not the bottom). If you do, I will show you an engraver who didn't know what he was doing (or a score printed from NoteWorthy). In this case the only acceptable authority is actual practice. Some random joker's signed statement doesn't hack it. And I advise you to stop embarrassing yourself by trying to defend Eric, I'm sure he can do a better job himself, and when the discussion gets to the point where he chooses to do so, I'm sure he will.
Rob
SharpEye is no dog. Not only does it make very few mistakes on good copy, when it does go wrong it is usually consistent about it, which makes things really quick and easy to correct.
There is a good reason that I harp on the Orchestral Staff Attribute, and that is that it's use is required in nearly every score of any complexity at all, while NoteWorthy's behavior is utterly unacceptable for any purpose whatever. It would also seem utterly trivial to fix.
My main use of NoteWorthy requires that I distribute .nwc files, in which kludges, workarounds, separate visual and sounding staves and the like are unacceptable. My workaround is to print the music without using orchestral staves, print separate pages with orchestral braces of each required length on otherwise blank staves and combine them graphically using Windows Paint. This is acceptable because I scan all the music I deal with anyway, and before I do the OMR step with Sharp Eye (or when I print music my club holds copyright to (or which is public domain)), I usually need to do considerable graphical restoration (like fixing loose leaf holes punched through clefs) of this same sort.
Indeed, one of NoteWorthy's better attributes is its nearly complete bilingualism between keyboard and mouse, which is getting rarer every year. The ability to select by clicking on as well as dragging over would be completely compatible with the current usage, and Lawrie's suggested keyboard synonym for a click on a chord note is, as far as I can see, perfect. The need for such a facility is acute in my case because of the extensive editing I must to do in correcting NoteWorthy's atrocious enharmonic spelling, especially in the piano accompaniment. I would also like to see the requirement that all selected notes have the same duration before the duration set button (or keystroke) is activated be dropped, as it adds nothing to either function or safety, and makes the correction of the tied figures MIDI input makes of triplets more difficult.
Finally, I must insist that neither "unexpectedness" nor the programmer's intent has anything to do with the definition of the term "bug" as used in the software industry. If the result is wrong, it's a bug, period.
Having been properly chastised, I will try to tone things down a bit.
William
I do recognize that NoteWorthy is a one-man operation, but it isn't Windows Vista. Note that I am not strident about things that would be great to have, like beaming between staves, only things that are bugs. The behavior of the orchestral staff attribute is not an unimplemented RFP item, it is something that is implemented and is done wrong. It is even called out in the documentation as being "improved", but there has been no change between NW1 and NW2. (Oh, and I worked in 7094 assembler and even 1620 absolute bi-quinary long before "C" or even BASIC existed.)
David
I too use your method, and I don’t think you would like to see what I wrote as a first draft.
Lawrie
Your keyboard synonym for a mouse movement, which I use along with shift and click to select long stretches without worrying about "catching" the scroll at the right instant are still "dragging over". And they don't solve the problem of editing notes in a chord. The ability to select and modify the individual notes of a chord in the same way as notes not combined in chords would go a long way toward making NoteWorthy a whole lot better. But it doesn't make the thing unusable, so I can wait for it. Remember, "Only Death comes to he who waits."
Oops, I spoke too soon. On examining the latest Lime 9.00 I find that they have gained the ability to print directly to a Windows printer. The thing really shows its MAC origins. There's no installation, in the Windows sense; you just run the .EXE from anywhere! And they've added import of NIFF and MusicXML files.
It's still useless to me for my main application, though, because playback is limited to the piano instrument patch, and the page of music displayed (it's so print oriented it doesn't even have a "print preview", and doesn't need one) doesn't turn or have a note chase. It might just be useful when I have to print, though. At least it handles orchestral braces correctly.
Try comparing your output to the "moonlight.nwc" in the NW2 samples directory. The abrupt square dynamics in your output are there, but not very good, musically. I am not really expert here, but from what I have seen, NoteWorthy is the best MIDI sequencer around.
I played Star Trek on a Nova 800, but left the company before the internal support lab got an Eclipse.
Rick, Sir:
There are things in my background I could brag about, but I think a sober mention of where I am coming from, to help the other members of this forum evaluate the technical content of my comments, is not "bragging". And since your input may well be of value, or even sorely missed, I hardly think your denying the community the benefit of your wisdom because I insist on playing hardball will do anyone any good. But then it's your call.
Most of the notation I am looking for is in MARL.TTF and TUFA.TTF available free at http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/cgi-bin/Lime/Windows.html. Lime is one of those wonderfully complete and capable and cheap engravers with, for me, two fatal drawbacks. The interface is too complex and too infused with pen-and-paper engraving traditions, and it requires a postscript printer (or alternative like ghost script). On the other hand, it's manual is a good tutorial on what correct notation is.
I must say, too, that the NoteWorthy system font is incredibly impoverished compared to all others I have found around the net. An excuse for not implementing the features?
Yes, I am aware of my tone and yes, that is part of the reason I don't identify myself by my "human" name. Another reason for the name is to emphasize that I have been in the software business since 1965, and have an in depth knowledge of the development of programming techniques over the decades, which now make massively extensive but conceptually simple tasks, like enumerating [music notation] abbreviations and their meanings, routine. For example, I just installed a new Windows XP driver for my TV tuner card, freeware written by a lone hacker, which understands some two hundred or more different models, and includes a user definition language for describing a card for which a good technical specification exists but the author overlooked.
Yes, again, "cleff" is a bug, and I have never found denial helped me produce better work or learn to spell better (which is a work in progress).
My "reference" is contained in the scores displayed. Or is "authority" the only way of establishing a fact?
If I were wooing a girl, the comment about chocolate would be germane. In this case, I think the best tired old saw is "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". One of my boss's comments when I stopped getting complaints about Data General multi-user basic (which supported twenty users on a 16 kbyte mini running at .8 MHz, and on which "Adventure" first ran), which was "maybe no one is using it" is also germane. No one can use an unusable (in this case for producing quality engravings, not "some computer printout") product.
It is a universal rule of all engineering practice (I am also an EE) that a system incapable of producing a required output, such as a refrigerator that will not cool, is seriously deficient. In the software trade we call these deficiencies bugs. In the case of the orchestral staff attribute, the standards of music engraving demand that all and only those staves so marked should have an orchestral bracket, and that the tops and bottoms of each such bracket in the system must have little circular finials. NoteWorthy puts a bar across the entire system if any stave is marked orchestral, and the finials appear only on the top or bottom staff of a system. The designer of a system that is to interface with the outside world in which standards already exist does not have a free choice of the way he wants to handle such items. I provide four examples from the 138 scores I have made Worthy of Note in the last three years, and will testify under oath that I have seen no counterexamples.
This one wart on its nose makes NoteWorthy a joke as a serious printing program, for all the wonderful things that have happened with respect to slurs, hairpins and stem controls. It is all the more ironic, then, that after finally reviewing the entire example directory in detail, I find that NoteWorthy can produce a virtuoso performance, at least if the performer it emulates is a precision monger like Glenn Gould. For God's sake, get this fixed, issue NW2, and start working on NW3, which should print, understand and play all the standard abbreviations for tremolos, repeats, arpeggios, trills, mordents, turns, appoggiaturas, acciaccaturas, glissandos and whatever else one can find in ten minutes of googoling, as well as provide an alternative to dragging over items to select them, and the ability to select and modify a note in a chord, as well as a fully floating C-cleff (see the Chorus of Peers example) as well as countless other rarely needed but essential when required bits of feature and notation.
Yes, a way of keeping track of which repeat one is in during pause, and specifying which one you want to start in when not starting at measure one would be very helpful. I have occasionally been reduced to cutting and pasting a five or six measure clip of a song when working on learning a second ending with a nasty twist or surprise change from the first.
Thank you! Your suggestions are all workable, if not ideal. This whole area of trickery, like combining a text expression in a music font with the blank note head attribute, is something I had not thought of at all. I suppose with practice it will become natural, but I still would like to have NoteWorthy understand my intent directly.
And yes, NoteWorthy is an amazing bargain. And I agree, though I haven't looked that broadly at the issue, and have some complaints about NoteWorthy's interface, that it is the best around (except for Sharp Eye, which is not just in another league, but another game). I just think that there are a few needless nits about NoteWorthy's performance that needlessly put it in the non-serious or even toy category.
Rick
Fantastic! Blank note heads and no stem! I was wondering how to handle the difference between a short tremolo and two notes, beyond leaving the measure unfilled, as Mr. Wilson did in measure 16. If your notation isn't already standard, it should be.
As promised, here is described the horror of using NoteWorthy to engrave a score which needed to be presentable enough to be used for more than the composer/arranger's scribbling.
Toward the end of 2006, I was given the job of preparing NoteWorthy scores for the eighteen works to be sung in May 2007 by the choral society of which I am Librarian and Baritone Voice Leader. Mostly this was reasonably straightforward, as Sharp Eye is rather good at scanning good quality scores published in the last fifty or sixty years. Three of the works, however, were in manuscript, and the one here described was the worst of the lot. As a quick glance at the scanned page attached as Land Sighting001.gif will reveal, it would be hopeless to expect anyone but Robert Wilson, our former accompanist and creator of this scribbled mess, to play or sing from these pages.
Believe it or not, Sharp Eye actually found all the bar lines and nearly a third of the notes, which provided a sufficient base from which to complete the score using it's truly marvelous proofing facility, which I believe is faster than anything but a perfect performance on a MIDI keyboard, which I have, but not sufficient skill to use. I then passed the output of Sharp Eye through a midi file to NoteWorthy, converted the unholy messes of tied notes that represent triplets (how about detecting these, at least most of the time, automatically?), expanded the abbreviations for the numerous extended trills and replaced the symbols for repeated figures with copies of the figures in question.
At this point, I had eight staves, one for each choral division and two for each hand of the accompaniment, which is probably the minimum for any notation processor which actually tries to understand the music, as it must to play the score, and this was suitable as a home study aid where the voices really wanted to be separate and the keyboard parts could be suppressed. I then went through the rather subtle drudgery of hiding redundant notation, and adjusting notes that would otherwise improperly overlap when the staves were layered, to make a score suitable for printing.
Here I encountered the "Orchestral Staff Property" bug. I'm sure everyone reading this knows what it is, so I won't belabor the point except to note that it is listed as fixed in NoteWorthy 2 and has a line in the "What's New" section of the help file. They lie. The behavior of NW2 and NW1 are identical. As it would be absolutely unthinkable to either omit the orchestral brackets or present the results NoteWorthy produces in a score to be displayed in public, I drew on my expertise in document restoration and forgery to correct the problem graphically, using the two NW2 files attached, printed and scanned, and as it turned out, I needed to do this twice.
I blithely prepared and had printed a nine page score for the piece, and distributed it with the rest of the music at our first rehearsal of the spring term in February 2007. The print proved too small for most of our membership to read, so I prepared a score in what was judged by a committee to be the smallest easily readable point size, and this is the twenty-two page version I would love to attach as a Microsoft Word file. In several places, I could get only three measures per page, (one such measure is attached as Land Sighting 3 008.gif) and so the accompanist who replaced the virtuostic Mr. Wilson got a page turner for the first and last time in my tenure with the club, and still struggled with the piano part, which would in fact be the most interesting feature of this piece, if played really well.
Conclusions
The best way of solving this problem would be for NoteWothy to understand things like the beamed open headed notes indicating a trill and the big sort of percent sign that indicates a repeated figure. While you are at it, putting in notation for arpeggios, turns and other ornaments, also to be understood by the notation to midi-event processor, as simple grace notes are now, would be a good idea. In the end, the "Moonlight" example file should play as it does now, but with no hidden staves.
Failing this, nearly all numbers in NoteWorthy could be made signed floating point, including the "extra" note space attribute. The staff position attribute is already signed, and I understand from discussion elsewhere in this forum that the internal representation of things like stem lengths are already non integral, so this massive but straightforward overhaul, mostly but not completely confined to the header files, should be doable. True, a meaning and print representation for a tempo indication of "-33.333333" must be found, and notes probably shouldn't be allowed to migrate to the left of a note preceding them (though overlap really should be considered ok), but I have always found that being maximally canonical in language definition is best for both the user and implementer. (My day job, before I retired, was in software development.)
Finally, to those who have reacted to my previous recitals of obvious bugs with drastic consequences and minimal effort to fix by saying "what do you expect from a beta level product", I can only ask how many multiple years are legitimate for a so called beta test? Or is NW2, for all of it that has been done, really just vaporware? I hope not. NoteWorthy's unique ability as a superior sound-attached-to-notation generator is something I and my Club depend on, and while we could survive on NW1 indefinitely, I really would like to be able to print a score and not be embarrassed by it's appearance.
I have looked at the mxml2nwcc program and do not find it useful. Breaking things into a separate text file for each stave, which doesn't get accurately entered into NoteWorthy anyway just doesn't hack it.
I find it interesting, though, that you (David) find editing in Sharp Eye slow. Clicking on a note head in a chord and then being able to change it's attributes with one more click is certainly faster than having to delete the note, setup all it's attributes (not just the one you want to change) and reentering it. In fact, you can merrily click away on all the notes in a system that should have a certain attribute and with one more click set them all simultaneously regardless of what the previous attributes were, a relief from having to separately select only the quarter notes (say) that should be eights, and then... as if the durations are mixed, the set duration buttons in NoteWorthy become inoperative. To add a missing note, just point to that note in the image and click, far easier than maneuvering the cursor to a staff position and hitting enter. In fact, I would like to see the NoteWorthy interface changed to more resemble Sharp Eye's, especially in handling of notes in a chord.
The bottom line is that I always go to a perfect score in Sharp Eye before converting to NoteWorthy, because it's so much easier to edit in Sharp Eye. I even go back, when I find a mistake I missed, to correct the Sharp Eye, a habit I acquired generating artwork for etching circuit boards, where keeping the wire lists and graphics in sync is crucial. And enharmonics wouldn't be a problem if only NoteWorthy could spell.
Where's the problem? When I stumble while rehearsing, a quick click on "stop" followed by a click on the measure at which I want to restart is too little effort to notice. Indeed anything done to fine tune the sonority will leave the playback restart point at the beginning of the adjusted measure, which is presumably where you want to restart anyway, unless for some reason you don't want to hear the results of your adjustment.
It's against my better judgment to return to this thread, and many of the issues I will raise belong in other threads, but let me explain where I am coming from.
I prepare practice aids for a choir with a rather broad range of styles. (We perform part song for male voices in styles ranging from early music (Palestrina, Praetorius) through art songs (Strauss, Schubert, Dvorak, Grieg, Brahms, Rachmaninov) sea chanteys, grand and light opera (Wagner, Verdi, Gounod, Herbert, Lehar, Bizet, Rossini, Puccini, Mascagni, Sullivan), oratorio (Handel, Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven), seasonal music, anthems and spirituals, to Broadway (Porter, Sondheim, Rodgers, Gershwin, Hart, Webber, Bernstein), folk songs, gospel, rock, jazz, modern classical (Randall Thompson, Mac Dowell), barber shop, rap and even the occasional tune by Felix Mendelssohn, among a great many others. We sing, whenever possible, from the original publisher's scores, but I must provide a kind of super intelligent metronome/pitch pipe which will teach the notes and basic rhythms, leaving more rehearsal time for learning performance style, dynamics, breathing and other things that turn the notes to music. Thus, to me, NoteWorthy is a sequencer first and a printing program only for emergencies. (And I must distribute in .nwc form, not .midi because muting staves and slowing tempos is something my audience must be able to do.)
I will be posting such an emergency in a more appropriate thread, but the gist of the problem follows. I started with a lousy manuscript was unreadable in performance, but NoteWorthy insisted in putting much too much space between notes, and wouldn't let me squeeze a measure down by a single millimeter to avoid having one measure in a line rather than two, which really should have been able to squeeze down, this time more significantly, to get three measures on a line and a reasonably compact score that would minimize page turns for the accompanist.
Bottom line; I think NoteWorthy Composer (it's official full name) is a much better sequencer than it is an engraver, and I can not understand why so many really obvious and easy to fix problems in both areas are ignored.
Not being a pianist myself, I must rely on the opinions of my two voice coaches (one of whom actually makes more money as a club accompanist than singing or teaching) and my chorus's accompanist, who read the tied figures just fine.
It seems we have a lively discussion going here, but I must but out. My scores are all prepared for singers who need a way of practicing at home. For them, any discrepancy between the notation on the screen and what they hear would be disastrous.
The stuff about swing rhythm is interesting and useful, but the stuff about hacking the tempo track, and in another thread getting the "orchestral" staff property to get closer to the way it should work in the first place by means of overlays leaves me cold. I get the impression that here we have a bunch of old APL programmers still searching for the most obscure line of code that does something useful.
Look for me under orchestral staff property, minimum widths for measures, the enharmonic spelling generated by MIDI input (and the audit enharmonic spelling tool), the inability to force a group of notes to a single value when they start out with different durations, the need to delete and reenter notes of a chord to get accidentals corrected, and a few others.
Youse guys seem to think four measures a piece makes. Aint so. Your printouts may take less toner to print, but they aren't simpler musically, and don't work in the more rhythmically complex sections. Notating the right hand in bass clef is absolutely standard when called for, but again doesn't work everywhere outside of your precious four measures. Check out the attachment, where some of the clef changes have the double purpose of emphasizing some of the syncopations at measures 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34 and 35, among others.
Let me point out that I chose this example partly because I attended a concert of the Down Town Glee Club in NYC last year and was aghast to hear them doing it all pretty straight, and even leaving out the syncopations, which my voice teacher tells me are very hard to sing. But they are part of the heart and soul of the piece. I learned them from this nwc file.
And yes, any good pianist can get the swing if it is notated, and a swing musician, like Gladstone Trott, music director and conductor of the DGC, can miss seeing the little note attached to the time signature, if it's there at all. I prefer WYSIWYG, it's safer. Besides, with our modern computer tools there is no longer a need to slavishly carry a tradition, which arose, it seems, out of a pressing need to minimize pen strokes in copying.
Don't bother looking up old recordings to find discrepancies. This is a "new" arrangement cooked up by myself and my voice teacher just four years ago. After all, what artist would re-record a standard without making any changes at all?
David,
How could you have interpreted "write out" as being on paper, not with noteworthy? After all, I provided the results as an attachment.
Rick G.,
My experience was otherwise. The tied "untriplets" keep the notes flowing at a constant rate, which the piano player it was written for really liked. This is, though, an early effort, and I admit I probably should clean it up a bit if the need should arise to use it again. "Goodnight..." is more like my current output.
Thank you Mr. Pardy. I just repeatedly hit "browse" ignoring (more attachments).
I think these show why I think using hidden jury rigged workarounds are not only not necessary, they may not even be faster or easier than just writing out the music.
My use for this would be to import SharpEye native format (.mro) files into NoteWorthy. Passing them through MIDI format just looses to much, especially the correct enharmonic spelling of notes. Now if NoteWorthy could just get that right...
Doing this via an external text to text translator could be possible, but only if .nwc format is fully documented, as .mro format has been for a long time. Or even better it could be added as an input format that NoteWorthy understands directly.
For my edification, what are you trying to do here? When I put four part harmony on two staves one voice on each staff is all stem up and the other all stem down, so getting the flags to line up is not an issue.
Why so much discussion on this? The tie overrides the staccato, period. NoteWorthy Composer has always, to my knowledge, been primarily a composition/arrangement aid, not a virtuoso performer (dispite the wonderfull "Moonlight" in the examples directory). To expect it to interpret something someone once saw on some hand-written big band charts like "When you see this, it's always played like this in this style of music." is just plain unreasonable. Now if we could just get what we've written onto paper decently without going to a heavy duty engraving program...
Thanks for the welcome, Mr. Palmquist. There are lots of things in music, like rubato, Adagio movements, figured bases and the Who's guitar windmills which aren't or even can't be notated precisely. Your referenced page is a good discussion of swing and it's relatives, but though I can remember the 50's (and they are invoked in the time signature of my example piece) I can't remember the 30's. My point was (and is) that asking for an automatic "swingifier" is chasing a mirage, and that doing it by hand isn't all that much work--maybe even less than developing a semi-functioning hack.
Now can anybody tell me how I can get to the second and third attachments the posting editor promised would be tacked on to my comment?
These tricks and hacks are all very well, but they do make mistakes. Also, the exact rythm is often slightly off, and as I create these files as choral practice accompaniment, this is fatal to my purpose.
I have two ways to do it. One is just bite the bullet and put in all the triplets and ties. In the Chatanooga Choo Choo example, note how straight and swing beats between the piano and singer create an interesting texture, which would be lost by hacking the tempo track.
The other is to go ahead and use duple time, 12/8 in the case of Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight. I did this after my conductor didn't notice the swing tempo indication in the score and tried to conduct it straight. Here too, there are places where swing and straight eighths beat against each other, which is a situation which just can't be handled automatically with less than a monster AI program.
A lot of work? Sure, but as they say, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Also, I don't understand the motivation for having the played and visible scores be different. In this case it's actually distructive, as singers in the 50's knew how to make the translation in theri heads in a way which seems awkward to the singers I encounter these days.
See the attached graphic and nwc scores, if they really got attached. I am new in this forum. They didn't get attached. Look below to see them.
Mr. Pardy, are you one of the NoteWorthy developers that you can say what was intended? As a lifelong software developer, I have never before heard of the position that an intended mistake is not a bug, only an unintended one.
Can we please hear from the development team? With the way this product is progressing it seems there isn't one. (Check out, for example, ISIS from the Audine group for freeware that gets new and improved features on literally a weekly basis.)
