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Messages - fitzclan

2
General Discussion / Anchors instead of diamonds
Hello friends. Its been quite some time since I have used NWC and have recently installed it on my laptop but things have changed a lot since my last use. I wanted to modify one of my files and notice that the anchor is showing in the editor instead of the diamond for object placement like text.
My files are several years old and I find that the anchor is somewhat visually obstructing. I much prefer the diamond but cannot seem to find anything about how to change this feature in the index, unless it is no longer available.
Thanks for your help.
Duncan
5
General Discussion / Re: Changing the speed...
There is a free program called PSR MidiPlayer that just might do what you want. I believe that you can edit batches of midi files with this program including the tempo parameter. It was designed to work specifically with the Yamaha PSR line of keyboards.
Here is the author's email (Michale Bedesem), if you want to ask him just to make sure:  mpb@sover.net <mpb@sover.net>
6
Tips & Tricks / Re: vstHost for Vista
Thanks Bill,
Do you know it the Marlin Audigy SF will work with Creative SB X-Fi Extreme Gamer card? I know it accepts Soundfonts.
7
Tips & Tricks / Re: vstHost for Vista
Is vstHost something that I want to bother with now or is the technology obsolete?  Some of the documentation as I am trying to go through the process (as per Lawries vst for dummies), of downloading and setting up programs seems to be quite old...say 2005, and many of the links to the soundfonts (on Hammersound at least), are no longer available. It really is a lot of trouble if indeed there is a weakest link that cannot be mended.
My problem really is that I have almost lost interest in writing (notation-wise) because I cannot get a decent playback.  Very frustrating.
Vista will never change, and I can't afford to buy another computer, especially since this one works quite well for everything EXCEPT music. Kind of like getting stuck with a bad dog. It's a 12-15 year sentence! (ARGGG!!!)
I have decided that if it is worth doing, I will do it. If not, please save me the trouble (and trouble it will be!) 
9
General Discussion / Re: Deleting bars from a song
What I do is add temporary repeat bars on all of the staves where I want to remove material and then begin deleting from the bottom most staff, upward the material between the repeat signs. If you start at the top, the measure numbers will change and it can become confusing when you are trying to delete say bars 34 - 42 of a piece. As long as you go bottom to top, it is easy to see where you are. When you are done, delete the repeat signs. Changing the color sounds like a good idea that will be worth a try as well.
10
General Discussion / Re: Request: Advanced player for choir members
Oh, and I had such hope for you Eric! You gave in at last.
See what happens when you give in? Ah... But if it would only just..., THEN it would be perfect!
Well, I suppose I'll just be happy with it as I have been with the rest of the program! Damn it!
All kidding aside, Nice work!
11
General Discussion / Re: Windows 7
Yes, thank you Rich. I have a sb soundfont capable soundcard using vista, but have not been satisfied with the results. Using the sf Lawrie sugested; Airfont 340. I guess it is a function of vista to ruin anything having to do with sound!
12
General Discussion / Re: Windows 7
How's the sound Rich? I'm talking about the everyday soundcard output that anyone would get, nothing fancy.
13
General Discussion / Re: Sound Card for Vista?
Hello Peter
I have the X-Fi extreme gamer card and am using it with vista. I am sorry that I cannot recommend it. It is too bad that vista was never good with sound and at this point it never will be. I am afraid that it is what it is. Windows 7 is in and vista is out. No one is making any improvements on vista and there are no drivers for older sound cards so that vista is not compatible with any of them. I understand that there are other options available, but they are too complicated for me to delve into.. I am stuck myself.  Would that I could go back to XP! If you are technically oriented you may be able to use some of the help that has been offered on this forum. I would look back into the archives. Good luck.
14
General Discussion / Re: Request: Advanced player for choir members
Perhaps the question then becomes; Would NWC consider creating a viewer/player with pause/stop feature for sale at a reasonable rate? As long as the full version has the capability, I can't see that it would be difficult to program into the player, but I also understand why they won't do it for free. It's worth a try.
15
General Discussion / Re: Request: Advanced player for choir members
Joe & Warren, I can't speak for the "powers that be" at NWC, but I can put myself in their position. Why would I want the "business" (?) of 38 choristers who are too parsimonious to pay for my hard work?  I can do without that kind of "business". What they want is for me to work for nothing. I doubt that they would be so quick to reciprocate.
By the way, the NWC viewer does not discriminate against ensembles as has been intimated in this thread. It is as useful to me as it is to them. I like the program for writing, but I can't use the free player for that, hence, I buy the program. Although I rarely use the player, it's nice to have available. Stop and play from within the piece are not available to anyone using the player.
Most musicians are not stand alone. They interact with others, some write, some arrange others sing...whatever. Not just ensembles. It seems to me that you are not willing to purchase the much higher priced Sibelius program so that your friends can benefit from their free player replete with pause.
Most students wouldn't think twice about buying a book for a required music history class that cost $75.00 which will probably never be opened once the class is completed, but there is an awful lot of complaining about the cost of this $49.00 program which will be useful to any student of music well into the future. I don’t think it is too much to ask for each one to invest in a simple tool-of-the-trade.
Personally, I would spend more time selling your friends on the idea of purchasing the program than trying to get the powers that be to give it away. I find it remarkable that people feel entitled to enjoy the labor of others for free. It just doesn't make sense!  My logic is simple. Select the program that best suits your needs and then buy it.
16
General Discussion / Re: Request: Advanced player for choir members
Seems that we have had this discussion before.
What in the world did musicians do before the advent of computer generated music? They played their instrument and learned by practicing. After a while, they were able to sight read pretty well so that they could sing the music by sight. After a longer while, it all became second nature and they could get a pretty good idea of what the music might sound like if it was played and sung together in their heads.
Now we need to have note chase or we can't get it?
The idea of NWC (as I imagine it), is to facilitate musical notation for the composer. The problems that arise with hand written notation are obvious and many. We have all seen (and done) examples of this. Now we can write a piece of music and have others perform it, or send it to a publisher or an artist. I say...Fantastic and Bravo! Really wonderful.
I understand that that is not what some want to use it for, and that perhaps other software companies offer more features with their free player. The problem is that you cannot compose music that will play on their free player without purchasing the high priced software program. That is quite a glitch to overcome in my estimation. NWC is priced so moderately in comparison that I think that anyone who is serious about what they do musically should break out the wallet and splurge...But not too much! They will be glad they did. Problem solved!
17
General Discussion / Piano Bar
Haven't been using NWC for a while. Is it possible to build chords using the piano bar featrue?  If so what's the combination? Thx.

19
General Discussion / Re: can noteworthy convert a music file to sheet music
Yeah, watch out for that dangerous information... You might learn something.
Oh no that's right, Rickki has had the final word. How dare you question it or have an alternative idea?
Someone ought to tell him that inquiring minds are the ones that bring forth brilliant inventions.
Just because he hasn't figured it out, doesn't mean it can't be done.
Rick, I hope your music is more clever than your posts. But somehow I doubt it.
20
General Discussion / Re: can noteworthy convert a music file to sheet music
Well, I expedted that.
If you are familiar with the song and have at least half a brain, you can get along just fine without being told what the time signature and tempo are. Right and left hand are pretty predictable last time I checked as are your replies. How funny is that?
21
General Discussion / Re: can noteworthy convert a music file to sheet music
I believe there are many free programs out there such as "Media Converter" that will convert a wav to midi. NWC will open a midi and convert it to written notation, although it won't be perfect unless it started out that way. In other words, if it started as sheet music in the form of an NWC file, and was recorded to wav as it played, or if it was converted from the sheet to midi via a program such as NWC and recorded to wav say on a keyboard, it should translate into sheet music perfectly.
However, if the song was originally played by a human being instead of a machine, and recorded to wav, the resulting sheet will be near impossible to read as the notes will be broken up into fragments due to imperfect timing.
Midi records events as they are, (or as it thinks they are), not as they should be.
That has been my experience although I am sure that I will be corrected promptly if I have been incorrect in any detail. Good luck.
23
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Is it possible to exchange individual soundfonts from within a collection. Not a fan of the piano in Airfont. I see there are lots of single soundfonts available. Be nice if you could modify or customize. Seems like it must be possible.
24
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Just want to say thanks to you guys for all of the help. Finally have a decent souind coming from this PC. Almost gave up again but Tony & Lawrie really came through. Hope I can reciprocate in some way. Will probably have a few more questions on this topic soon, but have enough to chew on for now. Thanks again. Duncan
25
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Thanks Tony,
I know I was on that site at some point, but I don't remember where I got the download from. I was off today and spent hours on the pc reading and trying to understand how to work this soundfont thing but I have gotten nowhere.  I am at a real loss when I read pages of explanations that are full of abreviations.
I was able to download airfont 340 from another site but it doesn't seem to have instructions or a help file. I am wondering how you get the fonts once installed into the sound card, to be accessed in NWC. There is a text file containing what looks like instrument definitions. Can this be used to create a .nwcitree, and if so, how? Not that I'm there yet. I will give Melodymachine a try tomorrow. Thanks for the tip.
26
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Hi Tony,
Got to the point of clicking start, but then get a message "Unrecognized Compression Method! You may need a newer version of sfArk". I am going to look into that, but I only downloaded the program 2 days ago. Would expect it to be the latest version. The file is 38,750 KB. It is a collection, so I guess that is all of the soundfonts bundled together. There was a readme text file with the program. Unfortunately, it is written in Spanish. Not much use to me as my sp. vocab. is limited. Then I tried the Help file within the program. Unfortunately again, I am running Vista and the help file was created for Windows help that is not supported in vista. Very frustrating. So I'm back to square one.
27
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Well, I thought this was going to be easy but...
A few questions...
I have downloaded airfont 340 which was in a winrar format. Downloaded winrar, opened folder. Airfont is in sfArk format. Downloaded sfark_sfpack, also in winrar - extracted files to desktop. When I try to open Airfont a message comes up about searching the internet for a program to open it with or browse pc for program. When I browse, the sfark program does not appear in the list. What next?
I have also downloaded a single yamaha dx7 piano soundfont just to try out. Haven't figured out how to load it into the soundfont manager yet. I have created a folder on the desktop for soundfonts and my intention was to download a bunch of sounds to try. The winrar is only a trial software good for 40 days, so once downloaded and extracted, I can go through at my leisure (if there is such a thing).
I am assuming that once installed, airfont will automatically have its own itree in nwc under soundbank B?
Not sure I understand Soundfont cache, (dymanic/Static). Have oodles of memory on my pc. Does Static Cache automatically appropriate memory required to use soundfonts?
I'll stop here, but there will inevitably be more questions. Many thanks. Duncan
28
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Any time I have had to deal with foreign assistants, they have been quite helpful and super polite which is refreshing.
Anyway, the e-mail tech said just what Lawrie suggested. Uninstall and reinstall software. He said DO NOT click on setup.exe in any of the folders for some reason. At any rate, we have success. I now have the soundfont manager.
Now back to the original question of what to load. Where do I find the best sounds? I know that is subjective, but I am sure that some can be ruled out altogether. Where do I download the soundfonts to so that I can add them to the card? I am wondering if it is possible to load soundfonts from the Yam keyboard. That would be ideal although there are over 1500 instrument definitions, I'm sure I could hone it down.
29
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Thanks Lawrie and Tony. I uninstalled the drivers for the Audio card before installing the new one so that should not be a problem. I did send off my quandry to the Creative e-mail support as Tony suggested. Who knows how long that will take, but I have time. I have a B- study to finish preparing for tomorrow night so it'll be first things first anyway. I'm sure there will be a solution so I don't want to get too crazy. Will let you know how it goes. -D
30
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
I suppose that's going to have to wait. 12:15 am here. Less than 6 hours of dreaming doesn't do a boy good. Don't want to be a grouch tomorrow. Thanks for the help as always. I will reinstall the CD tomorrow and see what happens. -D
31
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Found the folder and double clicked the setup.exe but also got an error code-6003. Not running any apps and have plenty of space.
32
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Yes. I had the xteme audio card and switched it out for the gamer just for this purpose. Let me check the cd again for the folder you mentioned.
33
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
I am running vista. There are seperate CD's for vista and XP. I don't see any download on their website for soundfont manager although there is a WavStudio7. I downloaded that but is seems similar to Vienna which is too complex for me. I don't want to make my own synths, Just want a decent set of sounds to work with.
34
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Hi Lawrie,
I went to Start | All Programs |Creative|SoundBlaster X-Fi and under that is : Creative Audio console, Creative Diagnostics, Creative Volume Panel and documentation. No sound font manager!
After installing the software from the CD, I went to the Creative website and downloaded the latest driver. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that? I did explore the installation CD and did not see anything that was called soundfont manager.
35
General Discussion / Re: Soundfonts
Hey Guys,
Thanks for your replies. The Card is Creative SB X-Fi Xteme Gamer. I don't believe that there was any software other than the instalallation cd but I will have to make sure of that. I know there was a demo cd which seemed like a lot of nonsense to me. Yes Lawrie, there are A and B banks.

Checked the installation CD and Demo disc and don't see any soundfont manager software or anything of the like. The help file has nothing on soundfont management. Hmmm...
36
General Discussion / Soundfonts
Is there any kind of instruction on Soundfonts, how to load them, what are the best, or easiest to load etc...
Finally got a soundcard that is compatible but have no idea how to go about obtaining soundfonts or how to load them. I read the text files on the Creative site, but it is geared more toward making your own soundfonts from your own samples, which is definately out of my comfort zone. Other sites such as Hammersound don't give any instruction at all that I am aware of. It seems that there are very few who are knowledgable in this area. Appreciate any guidance. TIA Duncan
38
Instrument Trees / Re: Yamaha XG Tree
Hi Lawrie,
Wow! That looks like an awful lot to chew! I shall have to re-read it several times before diving in. Most of it sounds over my head. Thanks for all of the explaining, I'm sure it took a while to run through all of that. You know I'll be back once I get started.
Thanks again. -D
39
Instrument Trees / Re: Yamaha XG Tree
One more thing. When using MS Word to construct an i-tree, is there a specific font or size that must be used? Thanks. -D
40
Instrument Trees / Re: Yamaha XG Tree
Thanks Tony. I would never attempt such a feat as dual operating systems, however my birthday is coming up soon. Perhaps I will request a new sound card. Even if I had the X-Fi Gamer, I would like to have the i-tree to match my Yammie. I could definately get into that. As it stands, I can't even finish the piece I last started as I would like to orchestrate it to a moderate degree. The sound is so bad that it's just not worth the effort. On top of that I still haven't figured out how to get the auto save feature to work in NWC in Vista, so I have to manually save every few minutes. Way too aggrieving.
41
Instrument Trees / Re: Yamaha XG Tree
Well Tony, all was well until I purchased a new computer with Vista. Need I say more? Of course I can't go backwards as my old pc died. I will however give the i-tree a try when I get a moment. Thanks guys. I'll surely be back for more questions when I get on to it. Cheers.
42
Instrument Trees / Re: Yamaha XG Tree
I forgot all about i-trees, and I still am stuck with a crummy sound card that doesn't support sound fonts. (can't seem to find the x-tra cash for the x-fi gamer), but I do have a new yammie keyboard.
My question is this; Is it possible to set up an i-tree with the instrument definitions or patches in the new keyboard so that when I select instruments when writing with NWC they will then coincide with the instrument patches in the keyboard? This way I will know what to expect soundwise when I plug a midi into the keyboard via USB.
If so, how difficult a project am I looking at? Thanks. Duncan
46
General Discussion / Re: How to install soundfonts
Thanks John and Richard for your detailed responses. I have been stuck with a Creative X-fi Xtreme-Audio vista and haven't found the X-tra cash floating around yet to get the gamer, but one of these days it will happen and your info will I'm sure be of help to others. I really hate to use NWC with the sub-standard sounds.
49
General Discussion / Re: NWC has stopped working?
I was without sound for over a week and had tried everything I knew when I finally found the time to deal with an HP tech. Turns out that a windows automatic update corrupted the drivers for both of my playback devices so I had to uninstall the sound card and the realtek drivers. I am running vista home premium which automatically reinsalls the drivers upon reboot after they have been uninstalled. After uninstalling only one of the devices I still had no sound. I had to do both at the same time but in the end I got my sound back. Happy am I! I would caution you if you don't run vista to make sure you know what drivers you will be looking for after uninstall if your OS does not automatically search out and reinstall the drivers. I don't know about XP in this area. I'm sure someone else does. Good luck.