Skip to main content

Messages

This section allows you to view all Messages made by this member. Note that you can only see Messages made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - Bill Denholm

1
General Discussion / Re: Computer playback
Thanks NW Online :( .  That certainly works.
Unfortunately though I do like to hear the note or chord I'm inputting with the keyboard!  Can't win 'em all I guess.  :(
2
General Discussion / Re: Computer playback
Dear All,

After all the waffle about the problem in my earlier posts (I apologise for wasting your time) I think it is now clear what the problem is.  If I had correctly interpreted Rick's early suggestion I could have homed in on the solution immediately.

It is indeed caused by the Pitch controller on my Roland PC70 keyboard, which is quite old (bought in 2002).  It appears to have a faulty slider connection.  When I move it the problem appears and when the keyboard is switched off the problem disappears  Thanks Rick.  My apologies for misunderstanding you. 

It is still worth reporting (for what it's worth) that this problem cannot be activated when playing back with Sibelius or MuseScore, so it may be possible to de-activate it in nwc.  There is no problem with the Viewer because the keyboard has no input to it.

Cheers, 
Bill.
3
General Discussion / Re: Computer playback
Thanks for your reply Noteworthy Online.  I didn't notice that it was there until I had sent my reply to Lawrie. 

As usual Rick appears to be spot on!  I hadn't realised that he meant the Hardware Pitch Bend Controller on my Keyboard.  When I turned off the keyboard the fault appears to have disappeared.

It's past my bedtime so I can't do any prolonged testing until tomorrow.

Cheers,
Bill.

4
General Discussion / Re: Computer playback
Thanks for you reply Lawrie.  Happy 2017.  It's been quite a while since we have communicated.  Meanwhile my advanced age is starting to take its toll on my abilities!

I hadn't tried pressing <F6> to perform a reset, and when I did so it seemed to have stopped the problem - but after several minutes of play-back it happened again - - Grrrrr!

For years now I have only used the GS Wavetable Synth, so since I have a SoundMaster card, following  your suggestion I changed to the <SB Audigy 5/Rx Synth A>.  Unfortunately the problem reappeared!

Incidentally I have another old Desktop using Windows XP, and the problem doesn't happen with it either.  (I was able to change from XP to Win 7 with my main Desktop but it would not accept Win 10!!)

I think from all this I must conclude that it is a minor fault with the hardware of my main Desktop.  We appear to have eliminated all other possibilities.

Thanks however for suggesting the F6 usage.  It is certainly a quick solution however temporary.

Regards,
Bill.
5
General Discussion / Re: Computer playback
Hi All,
I'm not sure that anyone has found the correct answer to this problem.  I have had a similar occasional problem with my Desktop computer for several years.  The following are some of the facts relating to this problem:
*  It almost invariably occurs on Midi Channel 1 and only on my Desktop (many years old) when using the NWC Main  Program (since Version 2 I think) and while using Windows XP and later Windows 7.,
*  It never occurs on my Laptop or Nexus Tablet computer,
*  It never occurs on my Desktop when using the Noteworthy Viewer (or Sibelius or MuseScore)
*  It results from accidental transposition (by a semitone) of that channel and can be temporarily corrected by re-transposition,

I usually side-step the problem by shifting from Channel 1 to another channel (or by changing to the Viewer for playback).
If the problem occurs early in the notation of a new song I change that staff to another channel.

I hope this messy explanation may help someone to solve the problem.  I haven't reported it before because I thought it must be specific to my ancient Desktop, and was easily overcome .

Cheers,  Bill Denholm
9
Tips & Tricks / Re: Breathing spaces
John
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why don't you use the Breath Mark with its pause of multiple 16ths as required?

Bill D.
10
General Discussion / Re: Playback for congregational singing.
[/quote Incidentally, I discovered, to my surprise, that when - as you suggest - you use the Viewer's print-preview capability to display a formatted score while the File is actually playing, it automatically shows that page currently being played at the moment you initiate the preview.  It would seem, then, that it shouldn't be too difficult to arrange that the displayed preview page changes to keep matching what's being played.]

That's a detail I had missed.  It should certainly help.

Bill D.
11
General Discussion / Re: Playback for congregational singing.
OK Music John.

I think that in hastening to correct your information about the display and playback of a formatted score I probably gave the impression that I favour that form of display for congregational singing.  Personally I believe that Noteworthy's in-line display is easier to follow on today's wide-angle screens, with only a limited number of flip-backs to the LH edge.  With a formatted score, as with Sibelius or Musescore the frequent line changes and page changes can be more confusing and harder to follow.

Admittedly in the in-line display it is impossible to hide empty staves, so in some cases there can be a lot of useless stuff on the screen.

During our Choir's Christmas holiday period I often conduct rehearsals at my home, with the score displayed on a projector screen and the playback through my sound system, and the in-line display works very satisfactorily for this purpose.

Bill D.

12
General Discussion / Re: Playback for congregational singing.
Music John,

You are not quite correct concerning playback of a formatted nwc score if (and only if) you are using the Viewer.  If (immediately after starting playback with the usual in-line display on the screen) you click the "Print Preview" button, the formatted 'Print Preview" score will appear and the playback will continue to sound. 

The difficulties are:
1.   the notes are not highlighted during playback so it is not easy to follow the play.
2.   the pages do not turn automatically, so you must be ready to click the 'next page' arrow when needed.

The system works best when some effort has been spent on formatting, to hide empty staves and ensure that the systems are as compact as possible to reduce the number of pages.

Having said all the above I must agree that it isn't easy to operate the system.  It requires close concentration on the part of the operator.  It would be great if (1.) and (2.) above could be incorporated into the program, but I suspect it would be extremely difficult.

Bill Denholm
13
General Discussion / Re: Can I play it in a different Tempo?
Dick2.

The Noteworthy Viewer (not called "Player" any more) is designed to be perfect for choral practice. 

You can  increase playback speed by simply pressing the "Plus" key on your keyboard and slow it by pressing the "minus" key. You can achieve the same effect by clicking the forward or back arrows in the bottom task-bar if you prefer to use the mouse.

As a matter of interest you can now also raise or lower the pitch by clicking the vertical arrows in the task-bar.

In our choir everyone now uses the "Viewer" to play our Training Aids because of its wonderful versatility.  Its "read only" characteristic means that nobody can change anything by hitting a wrong key!, so all Training Aids can be distributed and stored in the "Cloud" eg in "Dropbox".

Kind regards,
Bill.
14
General Discussion / Re: In a repeated section, how can I make Sop. & Alto sound first time & T,B 2nd?
You are quite correct of course Flurmy, the mpc is one of the alternatives I hinted at.  I have found the ppp solution to be very simple and obvious, and requiring less technical skill.  The sound of the 'softened' staves at ppp level is swamped by the 'sounding' ones.

In my experience mpcs must usually be cancelled or they can cause strange behaviour on subsequent replays.
15
General Discussion / Re: In a repeated section, how can I make Sop. & Alto sound first time & T,B 2nd?
Hi Joe,

There are several ways you can achieve your aim, but I find the simplest way is:
1.     In the staves which are silent first time place a "ppp" immediately before the <Repeat Open> barlines, then place an appropriate dynamic (eg mf) immediately before the <Repeat Close> barline at the end of the passage.
2.     In the staves which are sounded the first time, place an appropriate dynamic before the <Repeat Open> barline, and a"ppp" immediately before the <Repeat Close> barline.

I usually make the ppp signs invisible.  The attachment shows the idea.

Good luck,

Bill.
17
General Discussion / Re: MusicXML to Noteworthy converter
Thanks for this Nicholas.  Your on-line Niversoft works very well.

I recently scanned 2 pdf choral files with Photoscore Ultimate ----> XML and then----> nwc via Niversoft, and found that the notation was perfect. 

However there were some errors in the lyrics which I laboriously corrected, and initially I was a bit disappointed, but to check on the performane of Niversoft, I also sent the Photoscore files to Sibelius and found an identical set of errors!   So the faults were with Photoscore, not with Niversoft.

The only remaining small problem in my case was with text objects which Niversoft tried to convert to extra lyric lines.  I imagine this would be rather hard to avoid, and is easily repaired.

In the above case I foolishly used a scanning resolution of 400dpi, but my past experience with Photoscore has been that when scanning pdf scores 600 dpi seems to be necessary to achieve best results. 

Thanks again for an excellent converter.

Bill Denholm.
20
General Discussion / Re: Viwer Mute List
Hi Fathafluff

I wonder whether your colleague is encountering the same "problem" as I did.  Before you can use the Mute facility by typing "m" you must "stop" using F6 or the red stop button.  "Pausing" with the spacebar or pause button does not allow the mute function to work.  Just a thought.

Bill
21
General Discussion / Improvements to Viewer 2.5.6a
Thank you very much Eric for the recent improvements culminating in Viewer Version 2.5.6a.

It's now an ideal user-friendly facility for use by choral groups to play back nwc-based training aids, and my choral-singing colleagues are delighted with it.

Bill.
25
General Discussion / Re: Sibelius, alas!
I'm a bit late getting into this discussion, but I heartily agree with Rich.

Getting back to Basset's original query, I frequently need to convert nwc to Sibelius.  It can be done reasonably accurately by "printing" the nwc file as a PDF, then "scanning" the pdf with Photoscore Ultimate and transferring to Sibelius.  You need to have Photoscore Ultimate with your copy of Sibelius and you usually end up with quite a few subtle errors (particularly in lyrics and dotted notes) to correct, but generally it is easier than using MIDI as an intermediate.  Photoscore Lite (the default version with Sibelius) is not up to the task.
26
General Discussion / Re: Help with MusicXML!
Richard.  Red face again!

On actually going through the "Save As" motions for an actual Photoscore file I realise that I can save as XML.  I'll see how the resulting conversion to nwc pans out.  I don't expect any trouble.

Thanks again for putting me straight on this.
Cheers,

Bill.
27
General Discussion / Re: Help with MusicXML!
Good points raised.  The reason I went via Sibelius was that the scores had lots of empty staves and I wanted to make more compact scores for the accompanist (to save page-turning) by "saving empty staves" (lots of 'em!).  As far as I'm concerned I see little other incentive to use Sibelius for most jobs.  It just happens that our choir purchased Sibelius because our Music Team members have used it during their music-teaching activities.  I usually prefer to notate straight to nwc using my MIDI keyboard, and this group of scores was a special case. 

I hadn't yet attempted to bypass Sibelius using Photoscore.  In the Photoscore Ultimate package that came with Sibelius 6 there is no obvious provision to Save As XML but I see now that the help file gives a hint that it can be done, so I'll be following it up.  (Cunning blighters obviously aim to discourage saving to other formats). 

Richard, do you own a stand-alone copy of Photoscore that allows exporting to XML?

I'll certainly look into it for future PDF to NWC conversions when there's no advantage in going via Sibelius.

Thanks for the very useful comments.

Bill
28
General Discussion / Re: Help with MusicXML!
SEF:

I have had a very similar experience with XML conversion.  We are preparing for a concert involving 1000 male voices next year, and I was confronted with about 150 pages of pdf scores from the organisers, from which I wanted to generate sectional training aids for our choir.  It turned out to be surprisingly straightforward with the following sequence of operations:
  • 1. "Scan" the pdf files with Photoscore Ultimate (no hardware scanner needed).
    2. Transfer to Sibelius 6
    3. Export as XML using Dolet
    4. Convert XML to nwc2.1.
     
Like you I found that nearly everything worked very nicely, except that one very large nwc score was missing most of its accidentals!  However with the other subsequent 6 scores (with fewer sharps and flats in the key signatures) there was not a single missing accidental.

I know this doesn't help you solve the problem, but now that I've heard of your similar experience I'll look more closely at my XML files and see if I can detect any differences.  If you get any help from Recordare I'd be interested to hear about it.

Cheers,

Bill
30
General Discussion / Re: Why do you use Noteworthy?
Good question Tony.
I joined a Welsh Male Voice Choir in 2001, 10 years after retirement, having a reasonable grasp of music theory and performance from piano lessons during school days, and subsequently playing Piano and Tenor Saxophone in dance bands in my teens and twentys back in the 1940s.  I was computer literate but totally ignorant of MIDI protocol and notation programs.  A friend lent me a copy of Cakewalk which allowed me to learn the principles of MIDI-based music, but didn't produce very good-looking scores.  On the advice of another friend I tried NWC and liked it immediately for its more professional-looking scores and user-friendly interface, so soon became a registered user.

Initially I notated each new (to me) song with piano accomaniment and four parts and made additional training Aids for myself with the Baritone part emphasised.  Eventually a few other choristers heard these creations and begged me to make training aids for all four parts.  Slowly it became an essential part of the Choir's learning process and there's now a rush for me to make and deliver the training aids by email as soon as a new song is issued.  We now have over 200 songs each with 5 separate training aid files for 'Allparts', Tenor1, Tenor2, Baritone and Bass.

Initially for these files to be of any use for choral training all choristers had to use the Evaluation version of nwc1.75, which allowed stopping and starting and repeating of passages anywhere in the score.  Fortunately the new "Viewer" is now ideal for choral training purposes with its ability to pause, stop, repeat and easily change tempo.  The latest improvements to NWC 2.5 will make our scores look highly professional.

"Noteworthy" is almost a magic word among my choir colleagues.
 
32
General Discussion / Re: Changing the speed...
Stephen,

Yes, as you suggest, you could copy the <setup_nwc2.5_viewer_pre5.exe> file to a USB stick and load it onto the laptop at your church, if you wanted to use the Viewer.  In making my suggestion I was assuming that there would probably be tempo changes during the hymns so you would need a global percentage speed change to cope with this.

If there is only one tempo setting at the beginning then there is merit in the suggestions to use the nwc 2.1 program and to edit the tempo in each hymn.  During playback you could create your introduction by typing F5 twice in rapid succession at the end of the second line of the lyric.

My personal view is that for unskilled computer users in cases like yours the Viewer is the preferred program because it is much simpler, but still has all the essential features for playback and shows a much more pleasing view of the score.  For speed changes it invokes the equivalent of a very sophisticated "Global Mod User Tool" requiring only the keystrokes <Alt Minus> or <Alt Plus> to make 10 percent changes, regardless of which staff the tempo marks are located on or where they occur during play (even if the staff is hidden!).  Very little training would be needed for your application and (very important in my opinion) there in nothing the operator can do to corrupt a NWC file!  This is very easy to do with the full program (eg by touching the space bar).

So you can see you have plenty of choices, each with some advantages.  Good luck.

Bill.





33
General Discussion / Re: Changing the speed...
Hello again Stephen.

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that the Viewer 2.5 (with all its new facilities) is the way for you to go.  The suggested procedure is:
  • Start play, then at the end of your introduction (eg after Bar 8),  click the "Play" icon at the bottom left-hand corner of the window (or type F5).  Play will re-start at the beginning.
  • Now click the "Repeat" icon at the bottom right-hand corner of the window, and the full score will be repeated until you click the stop button to stop play

Changing the speed of play is easy.  To slow it by 10%, type Alt- (ie ALT+minus).  Repeat this if necessary.  To speed it up by 10%, type Alt+ (ie Alt + plus).  If you are using a laptop without a numerical keypad of course you will have to type (Alt + Shift =) on the qwerty keyboard to  to achieve Alt Plus.  If you want to change the speed by a specific percentage, type Alt = and insert the desired percentage change.

Eric has done a wonderful job with the new viewer, and it's well worth learning how to use its features.

Best of luck.

Bill




34
General Discussion / Re: Changing the speed...
G'day Stephen,

Yes there is now a way to change speed reliably, but it involves using "User Tools" with nwc 2.x.  There is one tool called "Global Modification" that will change the playback speed of the whole score by a given fraction regardless of the number of tempo changes along the way.  Unfortunately it's way past my bedtime so I can't set out the procedure for you at the moment.  If no-one else replies I'll set out the procedure for you tomorrow.

Meanwhile why don't you use the new Viewer version 2,5 to play your hymns?  It is now really powerful and one of its features is that speed can be changed with a single keystroke !

Bill.
35
General Discussion / Re: Importing a hard copy
I agree with both Richard and Globbilink that the suggested importation job can theoretically be done with Photoscore and MXML2NWCC, but even with Photoscore Ultimate scanning a very clean score there are always quite a few subtle little errors that may take a long time to correct. 

I am the registered user of our choir's copy of Sibelius 6, with "Photoscore Ultimate' included, and occasionally over the last year I've tried the suggested importation method for notating scores in nwc.  Admittedly I'm still a bit of a mug at it but I can't quite get over the nagging thought that (except with very large scores) I'm better off inputting directly to nwc from my midi keyboard.

Bill.
36
General Discussion / Re: Request: Advanced player for choir members
To Joseph Roberts I would say that I admire your tenacity in pursuing our mutual objective, ie a more versatile viewer, but I must reluctantly agree with my fellow-Melbournian Barry Graham that we are "flogging a dead horse", more's the pity, since the logic also escapes me!

Bill.
37
General Discussion / Re: Request: Advanced player for choir members
Quote from Joe:
"It isn't easy to put such harsh words into a forum for software one loves and respects. 
It will take some time, but with a Viewer that works, there's a possibility of turning the corner with each new concert season."

Hear hear.

Bill.

38
General Discussion / Re: Request: Advanced player for choir members
Rick G., as usual I am heartily in agreement with your words of wisdom, except for one thing.  If you mean to change the relative volumes of the staves, then volume change should be based on “Volume” and not on “Expression”, so that, whatever the set “volume” the relative expression changes will be preserved.

I prepared the following long-winded submission several days ago and decided not to send it, but perhaps it may be of some use, so here it is.

Background:  As a member of an amateur 60-voice male voice choir, I took it upon myself in 2002 to prepare computerized training aids for the entire repertoire, (now approaching 200 songs) and chose NWC for the notation program.  Each song has 4 parts plus piano accompaniment, and requires preparation of 5 files, ie one for each part emphasized, and one with all parts at equal volume.  We initially distributed a copy of Noteworthy Player to each singer along with the first group of training aid files.

The system was enthusiastically accepted by choir members, but they slowly lost interest because of the limitations of the NWPlayer because.when learning a new song it is absolutely essential to be able to stop and start and repeat difficult packages.  It’s also nice to be able to change the tempo, but that’s perhaps of lesser importance.   Fortunately we were able to revive interest by (reluctantly) distributing the evaluation version <eval-nwc1.75.exe> as a de-facto “player”, and the system is now an indispensable part of our learning process.  We acknowledge that this is a minor violation of the license agreement, but frankly we reckoned we had no choice!

The evaluation program makes an excellent choral ‘player’, because it allows stopping, repeating of passages and tempo changes, and importantly it disallows saving of altered files when temporary changes have been made.  Our choir members are not in the least interested in any other use of the program, eg. for notation, printing etc.  To them it is simply a convenient ‘player’ that meets all their needs.  To this extent our “violation” of the license agreement is trivial. 

Choir members with little or no formal music training form a very distinct group of users of programs such as Noteworthy Composer.  With the playback synchronized to the notation on the computer screen, it is easier to learn new songs, and to practise at home. On the other hand most skilled musicians in instrumental groups are more interested in the printed scores.

I realize that in absence of the ideal ‘player’ or ‘viewer’ many choirs use MIDI files, such as the excellent SATB series produced by Music John.  MIDI players tend to be ideal because they can allow complete control over playback, but they don’t display the score.  However, we perform without scores on stage in the Welsh Choir tradition, and learn everything off by heart.  In our experience the full NWC playback with the score displayed on the screen is much better for initial learning of a completely new song by untrained people.  (For revision after the songs have been learned we are happy with audio output, so we record and distribute an mp3 version of every file, and if necessary help people to load them onto mp3 players, ipods, or mobile phones etc, so that they are always on hand for a quick revision).

So far so good.  We are all delighted with our NWC-based training aid system, despite our misgivings over our improper use of the <eval-1.75> version as a ‘player’. -  BUT:

Recent developments:  We had planned to notate future songs with nwc2.1 to take advantage of its many improvements, but we find that files notated with version 2 cannot be played back on any <eval> version of nwc.  This is also true when we notate with nwc2 or nwc2.1, then export as nwc1.75.  The resulting file cannot be played back on <eval-nwc1.75>.  This means that for the foreseeable future we must notate all our training aids with version 1.75 and continue with our “shonky” use of the 1.75 evaluation version as a de facto ‘player’.

Any file prepared with any version of nwc can be played on the ‘Viewer’, so we live in hope that the NWC team will be able to modify the “Viewer’ in at least 2 ways:
•   to allow stop and start and repetition of passages,
•   to provide a slider for tempo change  and perhaps:
•   .to activate some of the improvement now incorporated into NWC2.1.

There must be hundreds of choir members around the world who would welcome these changes.   Our members would be happy to pay a small license fee for a dedicated ‘Choral Player’ with all the necessary facilities.

This topic has been aired many times in the forum, but to my knowledge we have never been told whether the proposed changes to the ‘Viewer’ would be possible.

Another thing:  I think that many choristers will agree with me that it’s easy to forget  your key signature.  It would be really great to have the new capabilities of NWC2.1 in the “viewer” so you could quickly check your key signature etc.

Please Eric, think of the special needs of your potential thousands of choristers who are not interested in notation, but would love a ”you beaut” Viewer!

Bill








39
General Discussion / Re: 32th to look like halfs
Gennaro,

Lawrie's method does exactly as it should, provided that you click on "Viewer mode".  You are quite correct about needing a third hidden staff if you only wish to show Edit Mode.

Cheers,

Bill
40
User Tools / Re: NWC to MusicXML converter
Greetings lasconic.


Using your converter, I converted a 4-part choral score with Piano accompaniment to XML and then attempted to open it in Muscore and Sibelius 6.

In Muscore it looked almost promising on the first page with a 6 bar (measure) piano intro and empty choral staves.  All clefs, key signatures, time signatures, brackets and dynamics were OK but the piano notation was missing in 3 of the 6 intro bars.  When the choral parts commenced, the piano notation disappeared completely leaving empty grand staves thereafter.

The 4 choral staves appear perfect right to the end, as far as music notation is concerned.  The lyrics hop around between the staves, and there should be 2 lines of lyrics with the top line written in the Welsh language and the bottom line in English.  The top line appears to be complete in all staves but (not unexpectedly) the accented Welsh letters are not reproduced properly.   However the second lyric line stops and starts a great deal, apparently at random.

If we were only considering the choral staves it is a good result, with very little correction required.  But what happened to the piano staves?

Unfortunately, though the result with Sibelius 6 was entirely negative. This window appeared:

 

When I tried to go on, this window appeared: (See Error1)
 

(See Error2) This window appeared many times with further attempts to proceed, citing lots of lines in column 9, and later more lines in other columns.

I hope the above may be of some help to you.  In case it is of interest to you I'm attaching the original nwc2 file on which I did the conversion.
Cheers,

Bill.
42
General Discussion / Re: Are the rumors true that you can no longer save as midi in unregistered?
.....it's there to allow users to test-drive the product and see if it will meet their needs before purchasing it (hence "evaluation").

That being said, I dislike crippleware and would rather see the eval version abort after a test period (30 days?) instead of being open-ended but incomplete....or else have the "evaluation" version renamed as the "lite" version and be very straightforward about its limitations as opposed to the "pro" (i.e., fully paid for) version.

Bill, please remember the choristers of this world!  In my Male Voice Choir we would dearly love to use the free-ware NW Viewer, but it is simply not adequate for our purpose because during home practice we need to stop, start and repeat passages and occasionally change tempo while we learn our words.  We use the "Cripple -ware" Eval version purely as a de-facto Viewer because it allows us to use these facilities.  We would be devastated if the eval version were to abort after 30 days.  OK by us to rename it the "light" version.

I and several others have put it on the wish-list to expand the capabilities of the very fine "Viewer", but until that happens the "Cripple-ware" is our only real alternative, although its capabilities are grossly under-used.

Bill
43
General Discussion / Re: NWC and *.xml
Greetings violino.

It should be possible to convert NWC files to XML and then import them into Sibelius, Finale etc, but I have only had very limited success so far.  James Lee has written a program called nwc2xml which produces good-looking XML files, but I have only managed once out of many attempts to import one of them into Sibelius.  It certainly produced a fine-looking score with very few errors that I could find.

I have been unable to determine why it usually fails.

I still find when I want to convert it is necessary to save my NWC choral score as a type1 MIDI file and open that file in Sibelius.  This loses a lot of detail and requires a lot of editing.

Another alternative of course is to print your NWC score and scan it into Sibelius with Photoscore.  I have found that this usually involves me in hours of editing and correcting too.

So until some of our more clever colleagues can improve the reliability of programs like nwc2xml, it will not be easy to do what you want.

It's way past my bedtime in Melbourne so I haven't got time to seek out the links to nwc2xml tonight.  If you are interested I'll try to find 'em tomorrow.

Cheers,

Bill.
44
General Discussion / Re: Scanned music
Lawrie, you said:

[Don't forget we don't actually have an mxml export for NWC2, only Nicolas' import tool.  The available export is for NWC1.]

Have I missed something?  The last time I tried to use James Lee's nwc2xml to export XML from NWC1, it produced an outdated version of XML that would not import into Sibelius.  Is there now an updated version?

Bill.
49
General Discussion / Re: Extra Notes for extra lyrics
Oops!  Sorry to keep Coming back, but I just realised I did not save my final version of the nwc2 file before attaching an unedited version in my last post.  Please ignore the file <dotted_tie3> in that post and look at this one instead.

Cheers,
Bill.
50
General Discussion / Re: Extra Notes for extra lyrics
Regarding user font and character selection, I think Bill's work-around merits a closer look.  Some time ago I failed to achieve a smilar result because I tried to insert the white-out text string, left justified, before the first first slurred note, but the white-out characters failed to over-write the slur/tie.  Bill's clever ploy of inserting a right justified string before the last slurred note solves this problem.

With a staff size of 16 pt, I find that Times Roman Bold 13-point capital "I" just fits into 2 spaces on a staff while only 'dotting' the line between the spaces, so it's possible to dot a mid-staff slur/tie with very little disfigurement of the staff line.  I find it just acceptable for my purposes.  Many slurs lie ouside the staff or can be forced to do so by moving them in the direction of the stems so they do not present the same problem. 

The attachments show several slurs and ties on both nwc1.75  and nwc2 files (2a) & (3) resp.

The procedure is:
  • Set a User Font to 13 pt Bold
  • Insert a right-justified string of capital "I"s with intervening spaces before the last slurre/tied note
  • Expression Placement = Right justified and Alignment Placement = 'at next note/bar'.
  • Color = Highlight X (Where X is White).


Unfortunately nwc2 doesn't alwys work as well as V. 1.75 because of the greater slope of some slurs.