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Messages - Geoff Walker

1
General Discussion / Re: Playback problem in Linux
Sorry for not responding. Life took over and I forgot about this for a while.

I put together a script similar to Francis but I'm not much further forward. At least Timidity shows up in the Midi devices but still silence. I notice the wine midi mapper is still not present so I don't know what's happened to that. It was what I used in NWC2.5 and worked fine.
Playing back through my external midi player works fine so I can use that for the time being but I have to connect it to the computer (via USB) and turn it on at the mains too. having internal playback ready to go is useful for checking purposes. The external device gives better audio quality and is more comprehensive since Timidity seems to rely on freepats which does not implement the full standard midi patches.

Has anyone tried using fluidsynth with NWC at all?

I suspect some of the problem is a wine issue rather than a NWC one.
2
General Discussion / Re: Need to put one verse in italics - any ideas?
 I don't come on the forum much these days but I just saw this.

I use a different approach for lead sheets. I create the music in NWC, with the lyrics for one verse (and chorus, if needed). I save that as an emf file and import to a word processor and write the rest of the lyrics underneath. I usually repeat the lyrics from the notation with the chords for completeness.

If it's all got to go in the notation, I simply mark the various sections of the music 'verse' 'chorus' etc. as needed.

Geoff
3
General Discussion / Re: Humanizing
I used to add small random variations to the tempo. I used the random number generator in a spreadsheet to generate a selection of numbers then used those to vary the tempo. Ideally every bar, but more practically every few bars. at 120 you probably want to vary it to a maximum of +/- 10 beats. I have an electronic metronome with a tempo tap in and I use that to guide me as to how much to vary it depending on the tempo. You want to be sparing with the more extreme values, though.

Geoff
4
General Discussion / Playback problem in Linux
I've just updated both my OS and Noteworthy. I'm currently on Linux Mint 19 and Noteworthy 2.75

There's no playback. When I check the midi tab in the Tools/Options menu, the only offer is midi through port 0 which is no good. I have Timidity installed and other software plays midi OK. I also have an external midi module with a USB interface and if I plug that in, it shows as an available device and it plays back OK.

With v2.5 the available devices window used to show both Timidity and the Wine midi mapper but neither are there now.

A plea to Linux users. How do I solve this as I really don't know what to try next.

Geoff
5
General Discussion / Re: Loss of website
I think the plug was finally pulled on the 1st of the month.  "home.comcast" turned into "xfinity??" followed by ~wporter..." but then nothing was found.  This far I have registered a webpage name but haven't followed through on getting a host for it.

I use 1 & 1 and have done for many years and I find them OK apart from periodic emails trying to sell me an extra service or an upgrade I don't need but who doesn't do that sort of thing.

Geoff
7
General Discussion / Re: Loss of website
I've only just discovered this. I used your abc to nwc conversion fairly regularly but I rarely login to the forum these days so I missed your announcement.

Is there any way to get the scripts as I make regular use of your conversion utility. It works well for me for turning folk tunes into standard notation.

Geoff
8
General Discussion / Re: arpeggios
It's a case of "You pay your money, you take your choice"

Software like Sibelius and Finale come in several versions at different prices. The cheaper versions have fewer features than the more expensive versions.

Similarly if you buy low cost software like Noteworthy, you don't expect it to have all the features of the full version of Sibelius. Which features you get or don't between the different products. On the positive side, Noteworthy have been very responsive to user requests over the years and have steadily added features that users have requested. I just had a quick look at Sibelius and Noteworthy actually has some features that Sibelius First (their economy version) doesn't (double dotted notes was one I noticed) and Sibelius First is roughly five times the cost of Noteworthy.

Noteworthy is remarkable value for money and has served me well for more than 10 years. Yes you sometimes have to use workarounds to achieve your desired result, but I expect that at the price and I think you will find the same to be true of any of the low cost music notation software. To expect otherwise is unrealistic in my view.

Geoff
9
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
The same problem still exists in Ubuntu 10.04 with Wine 1.1.43.

--Christian

I bought a new computer (my previous one was eight years old and showing its age) and installed Ubuntu 10.04. Wine is now updated to v1.3.3 and the print preview now seems very much more stable. I tested it with a file which contains copious slurs and ties and print preview did not crash, so hopefully this problem has been resolved via a Wine update.

10
General Discussion / Re: Just installed NWC 2.1 & wish list
I play a fair amount of renaissance music. 4/2 time signature is quite common which means you quite often get breves. I have used the text breve with two tied, hidden semibreves behind it quite successfully. The boxmarks font includes two different breve symbols. Another approach which has worked quite well is to have a single hidden semibreve plus hidden tempo mark to half the tempo of the main piece. If your breve is in the middle of a piece, you can use a tempo mpc to reduce the tempo, then increase it back to its original value.

Geoff
11
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
I was working on a file this evening that has visible staves with no slurs and hidden staves with slurs. As long as the hidden staves stay hidden, the print preview worked fine, but I made the hidden staves visible to make some changes to them and when I called print preview, Noteworthy crashed, so it seems that the crash occurs when print preview is trying to draw the slurs.

"Offending" file attached.

Geoff
12
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
The problem appears to start with a floating point error in Wine's gdi32.dll at 0001:0004459b. If someone can narrow down the conditions that trigger this, we might be able to look into this further.

Also, does anything bad happen in Viewer mode?

It seems that the number of slurs is the trigger. In the previously attached Sally Gardens2.nwc calling print preview causes a crash, but Sally Gardens2a.nwc (attached here) with one slur fewer, does not. (I removed the slur at the end of bar 7)

I tried Viewer with the same two files and the same thing happened. There was some output in the terminal which I have copied into a text file and I have attached. I noticed that the terminal output mentioned a floating point error.

I can run the viewer with Winedebug as I did with nwc itself if you wish. Please let me know.

Also, is this possibly due to a Wine bug? Is it worth putting in a bug report to Wine?

Hope this helps

Geoff
13
Tips & Tricks / Re: How to Make NWC Play Jazz (Another Way)
I produced an Excel file some time ago which enables you to work out the settings for the Tempo multipoint controller to give the appropriate jazzy feel in playback. It is based on Marsu's original method, but the spreadsheet does the calculations for you.

It is in the Scripto at http://nwc-scriptorium.org/helpful.html#NWCFiles Scroll down to the bottom of the section and you will find a link to a file called Jazzyquavers.zip.

The file also works very well for giving a lilt to folk tunes, such as jigs and hornpipes. Quaver pairs in hornpipes are usually played dotted - approx 2:1 ratio and the first quaver of a quaver triplet in a jig is usually "lent on" a little borrowing some time from the middle one. The amount depends on the particular tradition, more in a Northumbrian jig than an Irish jig for example.

Geoff
14
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
Attached is part of the dump from Winedebug.

I followed the procedure described in the Wine manual here: http://www.winehq.org/docs/wineusr-guide/bug-reporting

As the manual says, the file created is rather large (36MB in my case) but, as they say, it is only part of the file that is needed. Their suggestion of the last 100 lines did not seem much use so I scrolled through the original file and found the point where the crash first occurred. NWC seemed to make several attempts at recovery, but eventually failed. I have attached the portion of the file where the last attempt at recovery occurred. Even that meant a file over the 128 KB limit but fortunately, converting to pdf reduced the file size to within limits. If more is needed, please let me know and I can extract a further portion.

Geoff
15
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
Does any slur cause a crash, or just some if them? If the latter, which slur(s).

Not for me. With a few slurs, print preview does not crash but there seems to be a critical threshold. I added slurs progressively to the attached until print preview crashed. Print preview crashed in the attached file, but with one slur fewer, it did not.

I have a file from Winedebug for the crash on the original version of the attached nwc file. As it is a fairly large file I will attach it to a subsequent post.

I have nwc 2.0 on Ubuntu 9.04 with wine 1.1.41

Geoff
16
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
So far so good after 24 hrs. I have used it a few times and it seems OK.

At least I will know what to do if it happens again :-{

Thanks for your help. It's much appreciated.

Geoff
18
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
You don't bother to mention what happened with the program hang. The message has already been explained.

The hang is as I described before

Quote
During start up it hangs with a blank window.

That is surprising, since NWC2 and its Viewer are very similar. The large number of warnings do not appear to be a result of any specific action that NWC2 is taking. Are you invoking NWC2 and NWC2View differently? If not, then did you recently change the MIDI setup for NWC2 leading to the program hang? You can reset the NWC2 MIDI setup by editing the registry. I would recommend deleting the entire tree for:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\NoteWorthy Software\NoteWorthy Composer 2

The next time NWC2 starts up, it will use defaults for all settings.

I started both up in the same way, from the terminal. I normally start up nwc from a launcher on the upper panel. I had not made any alterations to NWC's settings before this occurred and at the moment I do not have midi set up in NWC. I was using fluidsynth which I used to start as needed, but when I upgraded, the upgrade set it to start on booting up which was interfering with the start up of my printer software, so I disabled fluidsynth for the time being intending to sort it when I upgrade again.

Anyway, I will try the registry edit and see what happens and report back.

Cheers

Geoff
19
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
In the Wine help forum, your initial request is only related to the extra message, which has been explained. Something apparently changed on your system that now causes NWC2 to hang. The challenge is to identify what changed. For starters, you could undo your Windows version setting changes.

True. It might be better to start a new thread on the Wine forum.

Anyway to the problem. I undid the windows version setting changes and the original message reappeared, so I set the version back to WinXP and the message disappeared, but there was no other message on the terminal.

I then ran nwc through Winedebug with "=+warn" then with "=+err" to pick up any warning and error messages. There were plenty of warning messages but no error messages. I guess that if there had been error messages they would have been displayed in the terminal anyway. As a check, I also ran NWC Viewer through Winedebug and there were no warning messages at all.  I have attached a file with the warning messages.

Geoff
20
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
I posted the same request on the wine help forum, and they suggested changing the Windows version in Wine. I did that, changing it to WinXP and the error message disappeared but NWC still hangs on startup but there is now no error message on exit.

I tried the noteworthy viewer and that started up OK.

Geoff
21
General Discussion / Re: NWC in Linux problems
I have recently upgraded to ubuntu 9.04 and intend to upgrade to 9.10 soon with the aim of then upgrading to 10.04 soon after it comes out.

I got NWC working in 9.04 OK but the problem of NWC not starting up properly has recurred. During start up it hangs with a blank window. I ran it from the terminal and got the following error message.

Code: [Select · Download]
err:thunk:_loadthunk (NWMID95C.DLT, thunkobj_ThunkData16, NWMID95C.DLL): Unable to load 'NWMID95C.DLT', error 2

Can someone tell me what is the problem and how to fix it?

TIA

Geoff
22
General Discussion / NWC in Linux problems
I am using NWC2 in Wine in Ubuntu Linux (V. 8.10). It works fine most of the time but there are two problems that occur from time to time.

Firstly calling the print preview sometimes causes NWC to crash. There is no obvious pattern but it mostly seems to occur with more complex scores or files I had created previously in Windows, though even there some are fine and others crash with no obvious pattern. One thing that often works is to export the score to midi and re-import. This often removes the problem. As I have a dual boot system, I can go to Windows and work from there as a last resort.

The other problem is that after a time, NWC fails to load properly. A window will load but then just displays a black blank screen rather than the usual grey with no menus or icons loaded. It's as if the program has part loaded then not finished. I find that uninstalling and reinstalling noteworthy has worked fine so far but it's a nuisance. Again as a last resort, I can go to Windows and work from there

Although I can get round both these problems it would be nice to have them sorted

Geoff
23
General Discussion / Re: Print 2 scores on 1 page
I tested it first, and there are definitely "fat line" problems with an EMF to OpenOffice transfer.  By file as well as via the clipboard.  In fact, the artifacts are identical for both methods.  Sooo, the question is: is this a Windows failing or are there limitations in the NWC export?

My guess would be Windows and drivers but I'm not expert in this area.

I also did a test and I found that there was definite variation in line thickness in the pdf but the original Open Office file was much better when printed and although there was still a little variation, it was acceptable for my purposes. I have used this method to produce an eight part score and parts for a recorder group and the result was perfectly acceptable and the conductor had no problems reading the score.

I don't think the problem is to do with Windows drivers as I am using Linux.

When I first started doing this I was using MS Word and it would not import the emf files so I used to use Rick's dodge of converting the files to bitmaps with Irfan View - gif in those days, but it was an extra processing step, so When I found OO would import the emf files directly it meant one stage less and the result was well good enough for my purposes.

Geoff
25
General Discussion / Re: Print 2 scores on 1 page
Someone did work out a way of doing this which involved creating a single blank bar on a line then hiding it with some sort of rectangle symbol (From Wingdings or some such font) with its colour set to white. Then insert text above the next line for title of the next tune.

I tried it and it worked - sort of, but it was not very satisfactory as I was never completely able to hide the blank bar. Little bits of the staff would show through as little black dots so the result was a little messy and the layout left much to be desired.

Now I export the score as a metafile. (Print Preview then Copy) Save the metafile in an appropriate place and import to a word processor or DTP package. I use Open Office Write which will import the metafile and automatically size to the page. It is also a straightforward task to crop the metafile so as to leave only the music visible. I then add title, author details etc. I play folk music and I use this method to create personal tunebooks. It works well for me. Someone, I forget who, did a hymn book this way using Microsoft Publisher rather than Open Office.

I have attached a pdf of a some of my recent tunes.