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Messages - benspratling4

2
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
According to data from another company who sells other kinds of content to the same market, my users will predominantly have Mac's.  For them to run NWC, they'd have to buy & install a few hundred $ of software (a vm solution, a license to windows) like I did, and for that price, they may as well buy Finale (churches get a 42% discount!), which I also did (without the discount), and then they can open the Finale files sold from praisecharts.com and lifewayworship.com and export to MusicXML (which my app can import, if poorly), and that would also give them access to newer popular songs (which I've also been doing for testing, and wow, automated detection of pick-up beats in Chris Tomlin songs is next to impossible.).  And that would assume that their corporate machine would allow them to install a vm or boot camp, which it probably won't.  The better solution is they download the original file and just import it into my app, and voila, nothing else to do.

The level of work I'm already asking them to do is 5 times more complicated than what most of them will likely do. Surf the web for content?  Download specific file formats?  "Import a file"?  "Pick a video codec" "Set a resolution on a video export"? Import the video into ProPresenter or MediaShout?  For lyrics only, all they have to do right now in their Christian presentation apps is log-in with their CCLI credentials once, then whenever they want a song, they just type the name of the song in the search field, and pick from the list.  Making that process more complicated is something I'm trying hard to avoid, because it's needless friction in the adoption process (and a bad user experience).

And while I would love to make my app that simple, and that was the original design, I'd need CCLI to return one of my voicemails, which I suspect will happen after the app is available for sale, after I've produced a testimonial video of ecstatic responses of folks somewhere loving the notation, and after some celebrity worship music composer/leader endorsements (which have been surprisingly easy to get).  But none of that can happen until the patent attorney finishes the draft  of the claims.  So here I am with an app that's ready to release, waiting on a cheap lawyer from legal zoom, trying hard to solve the biggest problem my users will ever face (content acquisition) with things I can do, like writing an importer for other popular file formats.

And since NWC was an affordable solution for me to start composing in high school in 1999, and there is a plethora of content, especially traditional hymns, in nwc format, I have a strong desire to enable that content to be usable in my app.
3
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
Unfortunately, Niversoft's converter says "Binary NWC files cannot be converted here.", and I don't think my users will know how to extract a  binary deflate stream and inflate it.
5
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
I’m building a Mac app to help people sing along in church.  The vast majority are not musicians and will never be musicians.  It will export videos of a designed-from-scratch notation I am patenting, which people “just get” instinctively, with no formal training.  The app will be operated by untrained volunteers,  secretaries, and graphic artists; most of whom have no training in reading (or editing) conventional notation.  They will need an authoritative source of content, and hymnary.org has at least a 1000 well-formatted NWC files.  As long as lasconic’s NWC-> MusicXML converter has the bug about assigning lyrics to rhythms in subsequent voices, it will be useless for the vast majority of my customers.  Going through midi would lose lyrics and section-definition information which the users will need to re-order sections into alternate forms with no notation experience.
6
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
I did attempt to post a long detailed answer to David Palmquist's question a few days ago.  However, I see now that it's not here.  Suffice it to say that the viewer does not even attempt to do any of the things I want.
8
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
My users are going to need content, and there is a huge amount of .nwc content out there.  hymnary.org, for instance, has at least a thousand well-formatted .nwc files.  I just want the work which went into creating the content to be useful.  And right now there is no technical solution to be able to use any of that content in my app without downloading, installing learning to use a 3rd party composition tool to correct almost every single lyric in an entire composition.  And when faced with that level of work, my potential users will simply never use the product.  That is unless lasconic (or someone else who knows java and understands how .nwctxt assigns lyrics to notes) fixes the bug in his converter, or I write an importer from scratch.
9
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
Quote from: hmmueller –
many people operate under the assumption that if it saved as as TeX/XML/CSV/relational data, therefore it must follow the concepts of Tex/XML/CSV/rel.data. A famous example of such an ill-conceived format is the use of XML in Ant - a custom language would have been a much better choice.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I hate TeX, but at least there are probably documented rules for writing parsers on it, along with open-source reference implementations.
And anyway, there are enough well-designed meta formats that it's really a waste of everybody's time to write a custom one for almost any application.  And if the meta format is popular enough, OSs have a built-in parser.  At least json has a standardized character encoding, and xml has a way to explicitly specify the character encoding, something the nwctxt format does not account for.  Which means my app has to GUESS.  I mean, I hate MusicXML, and have posted on my blog often about it's laughably-poor design, but at least there's an XML parser built in to the OS on all my users' devices, and I don't have to worry about whether the metaformat reads properly.  And extensive documentation on what represented values can be.  It's just they sometimes leave out the parts about what those values mean....
10
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
Hope, because lasconic’s .nwctxt -> MusicXML converter makes mistakes when multiple lyric lines use voices to change rhythms on a man additional verse.  Without that bug fixed (and it doesn’t look likely), my users will be unable to import the content they created in NWC unless I write an importer from scratch.  And without proper documentation on what might appear in the file, interpreting my users files will be “best guess” instead of reliable.
11
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
Because examples have to be exhaustive in order for the format to be “understood”.  Without direct knowledge, there is no way to know if any selection of “example” files are exhaustive.
12
General Discussion / Re: Working with *.nwctxt files
Yeah, I was afraid of that.  But when I realized Lilypond files were just TeX, I got a glimmer of hope that nwctxt was following some convention, like maybe something defined by the Lua language.  Oh well.
13
User Tools / Re: Test Release: nwc2musicxml
lasconic, thanks a ton for this converter!  Unfortunately, it doesn't correctly assign lyrics to notes when different lyric lines use different voices to reflect a change in rhythm from one verse to another.  Which makes almost every real converted file unusable without a large amount of additional work.  Any chance you could fix that?  ( I don't know java or have any working knowledge of the .nwctxt format, otherwise I'd help.)