For years I have lovingly used NWC and recommended it to many others. It's a very simple, yet effective, tool. I was a beta tester for the new 2.0 version & consider myself a power-user.
However, I have just transferred out of PC land and into Mac land, and I'm very sorry to find out that NWC is not available for the Mac operating system (well, without loading the windows os).
So all those many charts I have as .nwc files and all that time effort to get them just right is now out the window. It's a very sad day for me. I"m not sure what I'm going to do with my existing files but going forward, I may have to abandon NWC altogether.
Thank you David for your suggestion, but if the chords are part of the lyric line, I won't be able to use the user tool "transpose chords" will I?
But not only that Photoscore scans and assigns things as it sees them. So below the staff, they become lyrics. (I never fix them up - very tedious in Photoscore, note by note lyric selection! I always fix those in NWC - SO much easier!) And above the staff, they assign them as chords. ... So i think it might be impossible (or alot of effort) to move them to a lyric line in Photoscore for the purpose of importing them to NWC2.
In Photoscore, you just click where you want to place the chord - and voila! - it stays put. No spacing issues. And if you want to move it, you just drag it wherever. Very handy. WOuld love if NWC2 would add this capability. Then it'd be even better than it already is!
I've been using NWC2 with great success. I'm so pleased to be able to enter chords & use the User Tool "transpose chords" - great for lead sheets.
When I'm doing a few sheets at a time, I key them into NWC2. But if I need to do lots of sheets, I open up an already scanned PDF file and 'read' them in (via OCR) using Neuratron Photoscore (the OCR program that is bundled with Sibelius). It does chord & key transposition. However, it does not have any print formatting! So however it was scanned (fonts, shape, size) is how it prints.
(I saw the other threads on SharpEye - I trialed them both. SharpEye was certainly more pretty & had print formatting I believe, but for scanning, they were about equal. But SharpEye was also more than double the cost of Neuratron.)
Anyways - So I save it as MusicXML and then import it into NWC2 using Nicolas' XML2NWC program. Works great. Imports the line nicely. Imports the lyrics. But does NOT import the chords (ie, the Eb, D, Bb+, etc).
Does anyone know how I can import the chords as well & thus avoid re-keying them?
I've tried out the NWC2xml and it works great! It maintains the proper clefs and it even handles the staves properly. (Previously, if my song had a piano intro (2 staves for 4 bars, e.g.,) and then a vocal line was added for 3 staves, when I saved and imported as midi, it read the staves very simply, putting the RH piano line on stave 1 and then the vocal line in bar 5 also on stave 1. Anyways, now it works correctly.)
I am running into a small problem when I have a whole note in the vocal line, but 2 chords. On my "lyric" line, I've tried adding either 2 half notes, 2 half rests, or 4 quarter rests. And the result is all the same - when I turn on Visibility|Never, it moves these particular notes very close together (not proper spacing, as it was before I made it invisible).
I'm getting around it by adding the chord names in that bar with Preserve Width, so the chord names space further apart. But is there something better I should do for this specific problem?
Thanks! BA
PS: I've tried the transpose chords and triple-checked the output - works great! Very handy.
PPS: Your idea of creating a template with your user fonts is a very good one! I'm going to do that.
Thanks Rick. I downloaded the file, but it doesn't really help me figure things out.
1) In order to use User Tool Transpose Chords, do the chord notations need to be entered as Text or as Lyrics, or either?
2) I've now figured out how to use the Visbility|Never thing that Lawrie mentioned. But it turns off the whole staff. How do I get the rests not to show (so I can tie my chord notation to a particular value, to allow for correct spacing), but get the chord notations TO show?
Okay. I've downloaded all the fonts and the user starter kit, etc. But there's a whole lot of stuff that I don't understand at all. I've never used user tools before and the code blocks I've seen are totally confusing. I'd prefer to just enter the chords simply with my keyboard.
Here's what I've done. (I'm TRYING to create a lead sheet.) I've got a staff for the melody with lyrics below it. Then I've created another staff & moved it above it. On this new staff, I've entered rests for each of the chords - eg, if there's 2 chords in the measure, I put 2 half note rests. Then I started to enter the chord names using Insert Text.
However, I have no idea how to make the staff invisible. The Visibility|Never or Print|Never that Lawrie mentioned, I can't even find.
Can someone please explain in very simple but detailed steps how I add the chord names on my lead sheet??
This is excellent info. Thanks Lawrie! I will definitely download that xml2nwc - it sounds like exactly what I need.
(I do find it strange this kind of helpful stuff isn't just incorporated into NWC by NWC - rather than have users create & share. I mean, it's absolutely wonderful that people can create this stuff & share it, but it is strange that if it works well, it's just not packaged with the program directly. But hey! I'm happy to have this info in any way!)
I'm pretty sure a midi file must be able to recognize clefs. In NWC 1.75 I was able to open a midi file with bass clef & treble all the time. Now it could be that the program creating the midi file is not converting the clef correctly (doing a translation from a treble clef behind the scenes).... but nonetheless, if midi is too simple for NWC2 to convert properly, then I suggest NWC2 should support importing MusicXml files (alot more detail). This is something I suggested in another post. After all, if you're going to provide functionality to import, it should work well.
In the program help, I couldn't find any help topic on how to do this.
I searched the forum & thankfully see that Lawrie P answered this question from someone. So I created a new staff & put some rests to equate to where I want the chords & I'm entering the chords with Insert/Text.
But stupid question, how do I get the new chord staff to be invisible (so that just the text shows up)? Even if I put 0-1 lines in staff, it still shows the rests.
And I'm assuming that in order to use the Chord Transposer which I just downloaded (from the user tools starter kit), chords need to be entered as text (not lyrics), right?
Also, I saw that Lawrie P also had some cool fonts for chords, etc. If I download those, how do I use them??
I'm new to using chords in NWC - and it's not at all intuitive. NWC really should improve this with, eg, a command under the Insert menu for Insert Chord Symbol/Name. And then the tranpose staff should work on the chords too....
Now that NWC2 supports chords and transposition of them, it should also support the importing of them!
To do so, NWC2 should allow importing of MusicXml (.xml) files. Is this planned?
This is a big deal for those of us that use a couple software packages and want to have communication between the 2. For example, I use Neuratron's Photoscore to scan my music (quicker than keying when you don't play piano), but Photoscore - although it prints - does not have print formatting options. As well if I want to save the file in separate parts (e.g., choral practice parts) I cannot do this in Photoscore. But I can do both of these things in NWC2 - which is great! But I shouldn't have to spend alot of time fiddling with re-converting/re-adding things (correct clefs, chords, note values) in NWC2. This is not useful or efficient.
NWC2 is a very good program. I've used NWC for years & love it - especially now with chords. Why not go the bit extra and make it really great, and make all your customers super happy?! (Happy customers spread the word & sell more products....)
Just to add that NWC2 also converts the treble clef octave down (the one with the litte 8 under it) to a normal treble clef, converting all the notes down on the staff.
Of course, as Lawrie said, I could manually move/transpose all the notes - but this really is unacceptable. Doing this is a workaround to a problem. Instead of doing a workaround, NWC2 should recognize different clefs and import them/open them as they exist - not converting them at all.
By the way, on XP, yes, changing the Autosave folder to one under My Documents worked (since the one defaulted by NWC did exist, but a "Limited" user account can't access - which I use on a daily basis).
Now that I think of it that's likely what the problem was - ie, re user accounts. I had already confirmed that the default setting for the Autosave folder did exist. However, it might be only the Admin user account that can write to files under ProgramFiles. I'm not sure about that, but it could be.
So I've changed my Autosave folder to be a new folder under MyDocuments. I will see how that works out. If I still get the intermittent error, then obviously the folder location/user account is not the problem. I'll let you know.
I created a midi using some music scanning software (photoscore). Then I imported it into NWC2 (it's easier to use & has much better features!) but when it imports, it always converts the bass clef to a treble. It adjusts the notes for the treble but of course with all the ledger lines, they're not super easy to read. The sound is still okay, but if you wanted to print, you'd have to do some formatting. It would be nice if it just read in the bass clef...
Was there ever a definitive answer provided for this problem? I keep getting the pop-up also. I've verified my folders are setup & accessible, so I can only assume it's a bug. Does NWC know about it? (How would it get reported to them?)
Yippee yi yay!! Thanks! I must have missed it but I"m glad it's there - and it works great!
Thanks!
PS: If you're a Virtuoso, are you an NWC2 developer? Just curious if we're a bunch of users talking amongst ourselves or if this gets back to NWC directly. Perhaps this was told to me somewhere....
You've made alot of great improvements, but it is disappointing you removed the Save As midi option - I used that ALL the time, as it's a standard extension that any software recognizes. i realize that you've now got a NWC Player which is free to download but it certainly isn't as convenient as saving it as a midi (and likely more expensive to have built & maintain).
But it also allows you to use your work in another program, as most other music-related programs will allow you to open a midi since it's pretty standard. I use this aspect alot too.
Anyways, IMO the midi is great for sharing & allows you to use your work in another program. If you could add the midi option back in, I'd be very grateful!!!!
It would be nice to expand the transpose feature so that it allows you to do just a section rather than a whole staff. This would be useful if you want to reuse notes (copy) from another staff in a different clef. Then you wouldn't have to re-key them in the right staff or copy to a separate document and transpose & copy back.
I really hate this feature. It wouldn't be bad if you could at least turn the option off - can you? I looked in all the menus & couldn't find such a thing but maybe i missed? - Anyways, I tried muting the staff I was working with & the sound still persisted with each note entered. Of course, I could turn my volume off - but that's a workaround to a simple, yet annoying, problem.
If it's possible, since you're still in Beta mode, in the very least it'd be nice to turn this feature off per staff with the mute staff option. However, even that is not ideal - if a user doesn't want the sound for note entry on one staff, they likely don't want it for any staff note entry. So it would be best served to be in an options or preferences area - where it would apply to all NWC use.
Then those who like the feature can have it & those you don't, don't have to! Voila!
