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Messages - Andrew Purdam

52
General Discussion / Re: M-Audio Keystation 49e Issues
Hi gang. I'll just put my two cents worth in here.

Looking at the specs at http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Keystation49e-focus.html, the keyboard should provide both midi in and midi out (it has a midi-thru port, which should act as  midi out as far as NWC is concerned).

It claims to be Plug and Play compliant

it claims to be USB powerable, so shouldn't need the power pack. But Milton's suggestion is a good one. If you have a lot of devices on that hub, it may be drawing too much.

One thing. Are you hooked up to the USB via a multi-port or a USB extension cord? If so, get them out of the way so that the USB connection is as "clean" as possible. I guess since it is being seen by the system probably means the USB connection is okay, though.

BugMan, Maudio say that they bundle Ableton Live Lite 4 with it.
Can LiveLite communicate with it at all?  Sounds to me like a driver issue.

Lawrie, enjoy your skiing. Give me a call, but I'm off-my-face busy at the moment. The world has become a bewildering blur.
53
General Discussion / Hadn't noticed this before - Viewer Preview
Call me slow.
I've only just discovered View | Viewer Preview
which seems to give you a preview pane of what it would look like using the viewer.
That's probably pretty cool.
And it positions the view at your insert-point, which is very handy.
Anyone else notice this?
55
General Discussion / Re: How do you create a bird's eye wirh NWC2
Gidday Ewan.

Yes, Ed. Even though Tina hasn't confirmed or denied it yet, Birds Eye are - in Australia - a purveyor of frozen vegetable produce.
Hence my "random" comment.
Their frozen peas make very good ice packs for sprained ankles, corked thighs, etc...

Cheers,
A
58
General Discussion / Re: Feature requests: Text Expression entry box/Leger lines hints
Pär said:
"The present, somewhat archaic method of changing a font, is IMHO quite outdated and resembles how things were done in 1990 more than what it ought to be in 2005. Instead of: |Font:StaffItalic|, one could imagine something like: |Font=Arial,Size=8,Color=clBlack,Style=Bold,Italic|"

I'd agree with this only if it was an optional override.
I think of Font:StaffItalic as similar to Word's Style concept.
Often you want the same style for - say - all your chord marks. Here it is sensible to have the definitions all in one common spot, rather than having to change each instance of text if you want to change the appearance of your chord marks.

"Leger lines hints:
With this I mean that as you move the caret above or below the staff, grayish leger lines should appear to indicate on which line you are. Now they don't appear until you hit Enter."

Sounds like a good idea.
59
General Discussion / Re: converting old to new
Brilliant suggestions, both of them, Rick. What a smart cookie!

btw: I just upgraded one system to a newer 'puter. Fortunately, it still has an ISA slot, so I could keep my awe64. But in going to Windows XP, I've lost the ability to use soundfonts with my old AWE64 Gold. No big deal, I still use my AWE Live on my main computer for most of my midi work anyway.
60
General Discussion / Re: Audit Enharmonic Spelling
"I just wish that I could invoke audit enharmonic spelling on a selection rather than the entire staff. If I didn't like what I saw I could undo it and fix it manually. I really hate having to proof the entire staff."

You can always copy that selection to a new piece (leave it selected), fiddle with the key sigs and accidentals etc, and then paste back. Not ideal, I know, but just wanted to remind you that it is an option, best reserved for infrequent use.

A
62
General Discussion / Re: I need help
I play (let's just use that term loosely) Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and Mussourgsy's Picture's at an Exhibition, as well as hunt-and-peck Rach's Prelude (his worst piece, in his opinion).

They all have requirements for more than ten notes being played at a time. The answer? Don't play them all at the same time. As alluded to above, you need to split the chords. You will often find that they are written for "one big splash down here" followed by "one big splash up here". At least, they sound better if you play the lower notes of each stave first, followed by the higher ones. You will most likely want to use the pedal, but that may depend upon how accurate you are with your chords! If only one staff requires the splitting of notes (normally the left hand), play the lower notes of it first, and then the right hand together with the top notes of the left. The trick is to try and get the split working as quickly as possible. This comes with lots of practice, something I never do these days, hence my constant lifting of the sustain pedal! ;-)

HTH,
A
64
General Discussion / Re: Best soundfonts?
After lots of sampling of soundfonts (I really thought I'd get into them in a big way), I settled for a simple font use, as my midi music playing was too casual to get too upset about it.

1) Get a good general midi font.
Here it really depends on how much memory you've got to "spend". I finally settled on E-mu's 8MBGSFX E-mu Rev B, which at 8MB is very good value for MB used. Sure it has shortcomings, but because my main use is playback of orchestral stuff, everything is lost in the general wash of things anyway, especially with some reverb on it.

2) Get Jeux v1.4 or later for your church organ sounds
And install in bank 42/43

That's all I use.

A
65
General Discussion / Re: feature request: entering notes with the mouse
"I think note entry is simply a doubleclick, but since I'm keyboard oriented, I could be wrong."

[The whole room gasps and looks at David.]

Actually, you are very close, David, and now I can give !ME! a better answer.
You can do note entry by
1) Right-click where you want to go
2) Left-click Note (the top of the context menu)

You can also enter Rests, Chord Members, Barlines and a host of other goodies. ALL WITH THE MOUSE!

Now does that satisfy, or what? :-)

PS: Our kitten used to play on the piano keyboard, but never the computer keyboard. She just jumps up on my lap, even if I'm typing (ie jumps onto my arms)
66
General Discussion / Re: Plug-in for google desktop search?
I can see what FoG means.
Basically, Google Desktop is a google-like search tool for your hard drive.
I haven't installed it, but it looks like it would need a tool written in Perl, Java, Python or similar, which would know the internal format of an NWC file so it could pull out lyrics, staff names and comments (text? - that might get messy, as a lot of text is used for extra markup - ie it isn't text as such).

The tool at http://www.noteworthysoftware.com/nwc2/nwcinfo.htm gives some information, but not lyrics.

My guess is that this sort of interface would need to be written by noteworthy software, as they are the only ones with knowledge of the nwc 1 & 2 file formats.
67
General Discussion / Re: Eastern Tone System/Microtones
Stephen,
I think you'll need to contact both Ertugrul and the Scriptorium (Richard) directly, as I don't htink either of then visit this forum that much. Both are on the newsgroup more frequently.
A
68
General Discussion / Re: *Ping* Peter Edwards
WScript actually has the advantage of not needing it's interpreter to be installed before you can start using the first one...

I think Windows 98SE might need to install something from microsoft.com, though it may be quietly installed in one of the upgrades, I'm not sure.

What I really like about wscript is the dialog possibilities.
That could really help with the interface.
I'm sorry if I gave the impression that the Scripto is PHP only. I'm happy to receive anything that is scripted (for transparency) and documented (the more the better - see my tutorials for examples)
69
General Discussion / Re: *Ping* Peter Edwards
And I also encourage you to add any tools you've written to the scriptorium.
Some documentation along the lines of my example below would be helpful. Then the tool can be fully integrated into the scripts web page.

Ranges
Author:    Andrew Purdam. Comments to noteworthy.nwcbeta newsgroup. (or NWC2 forum, whatever)
Download:    v1.1.2 2/12/04
Briefly:    Return the note ranges in a selection.
Usage:    php ranges.php [separate]
Parameters:
separate is an optional keyword. If this parameter is present, will return the range as two separate whole notes, otherwise return a two-note chord of whole notes.
Comments:    Useful for evaluating ranges of vocal and instrumental parts, esp. when composing or arranging.
Ignores clef changes and enharmonic spellings
History:    1.1.2 Added message for no notes in selection
70
General Discussion / Documentation for some user tools
I have not had enough time to better document the user tools that I have written and posted on the Scriptorium at http://nwc-scriptorium.org/nwc2scripts.html

I'm slowly getting around to it, but have only done a few tools so far. Please have a look at

http://nwc-scriptorium.org/ftp/nwc2scripts/generaldiscussion.pdf
http://nwc-scriptorium.org/ftp/nwc2scripts/howtousethetripletisetool.pdf
http://nwc-scriptorium.org/ftp/nwc2scripts/global_mod.pdf
and
http://nwc-scriptorium.org/ftp/nwc2scripts/ccapm.pdf
(though note that ccapm.pdf might change - I'm thinking of some sort of delete-only option).

I'll be away for several weeks very soon. If there is something you desperately want documented, please let me know a.s.a.p. and I'll see if I can get it done before I go.
72
General Discussion / Re: Global Modification (adp)
I must really visit this forum more often... :-)

Phan, I'm glad you sorted out the strict-case issue.
I thought about ignoring case when doing comparisons, but I wasn't sure at the time whether NWC was internally case-dependent. I could have a closer look at this and make things less case-dependent some time in the future. But since I am going on holidays soon, it will need to be in several months' time.

One thing I noticed in Peter Edwards' script that I hadn't before, and that is that wscript has alter box capabilities, which could make for easier user input, if a whole dialog can be built. The lack of comprehensive dialog facility is a major annoyance to me.

Everyone, please see another post on tutorial that are being produced for the user tools.
73
General Discussion / Re: NWC 2 cursor lockup
Mark,

It would seem that your bug is pretty unique. Congratulations! :-)

Firstly, I would check device drivers for both your graphics card and (more likely) your mouse. If both are fully up to date, and the error still occurs, then I'd have to ask which version of windows you are running. I've personally found that a lot (but not 100%) of errors encountered under Windows 98 (due to poor [well, not as robust] memory management) went away with Windows XP.

HTH,
A
74
General Discussion / Re: New User Tools
Hi gang!

Geez. I didn't know there were so many programmers out there.

In short, the reasons I chose PHP (an interpreted language - where you can read what is about to be run) over a compiled language was for transparency. Basically, anyone who knew a little about the language could see what they were getting. And everyone else would have those people to trust as a third party.

DGF, if there are any further questions (Lawrie seems to have sorted you out, thanks Lawrie) please don't hesitate to ask. Whilst I have many e-mail addresses, asking me here is probably better for the wide world (though, as I've just shown, it can be a long time between drinks...)

A
75
General Discussion / Re: Credit to NWC
Just a thought.

If you really like the software, why not give it credit anyway?
You don't really need permission.

A
77
General Discussion / Re: New User Tools
I forgot to ask DGF...
What in particular did you want to achieve with the tools?
Then maybe I can help you. I'm not sure where to start in reply to your 'crie de coeur'.
78
General Discussion / Re: NWC2 User Tools V1.11
Kevin P said: "Oh, my sweet redeemer, I am blessed. I just discovered the "Adp" (parts) script in User Tools. I don't know how to give my thanks to the author except for hoping he'll read this message here. If he does, THANK YOU."

My pleasure, Kevin. Which particular user tool "did it" for you? :)

Hi Robert. Glad the parts thingy did the job.

Warren, do your semware tools try and interpret NWC files? What a huge amount of work must have gone into that.

If I interpret your question (about not reinventing the wheel) and also DGF's question. Can I refer you both to the Scriptorium's new nwc2script page?

Several people of different 'thinking models' to myself have asked for better documentation. I do hope to provide it sometime in the future, but haven't yet found the time to devote to it. Hopefully if you think differently to me you can remodel your thinking so that my documentation will be helpful. :-)

Regards,
A
79
General Discussion / Re: New User Tools
I missed all the fun on this conversation! (I've been either walking in the bush, or busy at work...)
Thanks to all those who sang my praises! :-)

Warren said:
"I would like to be able to program these scripts, but the only manual I have on PHP has no mention of reading STDIN or writing to STDOUT or STDERR, sophisticated checking for sophisticated objects, or building new objects with boiler plate stuff plus info from variables. What is the best resource for this? TIA"

Warren, PHP is probably not the best programming language to start with. If you are familiar with programming, though, visit
Robin's suggested site at (more specifically) http://www.php.net/manual/en/
to get started.

Yes, Eric's boiler plate stuff uses "object oriented programming" but only in a simple way. If you are courageous (and a programmer), often the best method is to pick a simple thing that _you want done_, and modify an existing php program to do the task.

I agree that "end users" probably need a better interface with the User Tool mechanism, and whilst Eric's parameter interface is a start, I think a single dialog built up from all parameters would have been more 'friendly'.

I hope that some of what I said is of use to you.

Regards,
Andrew
80
General Discussion / Re: Best Songs A-H
For those of you wondering what The Critic is referring to, the Noteworthy Scriptorium is a user-driven repository of many (over a thousand) NWC files, including many pieces written by NWC users.

I think it is great that The Critic has raised their profile with a top ten (of A-H at least). We'd been considering a "best of" page for a while, but wondered how to go about it fairly.
82
General Discussion / Totally off topic
I've just installed Windows XP (as an upgrade, but I put it on a new hard drive - I've now got a 1/4 of a terabyte of disk space on my desk! Woo hoo!).

You can time me. I've just got NWC and NWC2 working, but I still haven't got Thunderbird up.
83
General Discussion / Re: feature request: ability to merge staves
user, this is being worked on right now by myself as a user tool. I am developing a selective-copy/paste/merge tool, but am hanging myself on merging multiple-length chords with themselves (think about it, there are many impossible combinations). However, I am hoping common sense will reign, and we can get a useful tool out of all this work. Give me a few weeks, and it may appear. As my focus on contributions is in the newsgroup, I expect it to be announced there rather than on this forum.

Andrew
84
General Discussion / Re: Convert singer voice wav format into NWC midi sheet
Whilst not wanting to cast aspersions at anyone's transcribing abilities, I still think that the best WAV to MIDI converter, especially for persussion, is your good self, and a lot of time. I bet you'd find that - even with a reasonable conversion - you'd be spending a good amount of your time correcting errors in the conversion.

A
85
General Discussion / Re: NWC really needs measure compression
Yeah, I see what you mean.
Whilst layout has improved with NWC2, I still think it needs major tweaking so that we can "kern" notes if we want to, or even just apply a global "spacing compression" to the whole score. There is a lot I'd like to do with layout capability.
86
General Discussion / Re: No answers to Pitchbend
See also page 165 of the excellent user command reference (written by several users, Barry Graham and Richard Woodroffe mostly) which is still relevant, even though it was written several years ago.

Also, Annie, you may wish to make yourself familiar with more of the Noteworthy Scriptorium, at http://nwc-scriptorium.org/ a website created by users of Noteworthy Composer.

Whilst it doesn't address pitch bends as you would like, it does provide a good resource for NWC users. I notice that the FAQ I wrote doesn't include pitchbending, and maybe it should.

What sort of pitch bends do you have in mind, Annie? Hawaiian/pedal-steel guitar sound, Turkish microtones/just intonation, long wind-instrument glissandi (trombone, clarinet, etc) As you can see, pitch bends can be used for several different effects, and if you were more specific in your question, you might get a bit more specific assistance.

And many thanks to David for his efforts in answering. It takes a lot of effort to produce well researched replies. I think he makes a valid point too in that NWC's primary efforts have been on the software, and documentation, particularly tutorial type stuff, lags behind. Anyhow, try the command reference, as it contains a fair bit of tutorial stuff, too.
87
General Discussion / Re: For Andrew P. - Transpose User Tool
Hi John,

Sorry I've been slow replying. I've been really busy and haven't visited the forum for a few days. Here's a copy of the reply I wrote in the newsgroup:
======================
Hmm. I just tried this here and can't replicate the problem.
Which version of the user tool kit are you using? We're up to v1.1 now.
Downloadable at http://www.noteworthysoftware.com/nwc2/tools.htm
Also which version of transpose_chords are you using? The curent version is 1.0.2, though the most recent change is trivial. It's at
http://nwc-scriptorium.org/nwc2scripts.html#Transpose_Chords

I've had a look at my code, and the relevant bit is shown below:
foreach ($clip->Items as $item)
{
$nothingToDo = FALSE ;
$o = new NWC2ClipItem($item);
if ($o->GetObjType() == "Text" &&
($t =& $o->GetTaggedOpt("Text")) && rootChordValue($t)
&& (isset($font) ? $o->GetTaggedOpt("Font") == $font : true))
{
transpose($t) ;
echo $o->ReconstructClipText()."\n" ;
}
else echo $item ;
unset($o);
}

The variable $item is simply the string that is being passed to the filter by NWC2, and hopefully you can see that unless it is a "Text" item, it gets printed without any alteration. This would lead me to suspect that NWC2 wasn't sending the Lyric=Never attribute, but since it works for me, I can't verify this. What version of NWC2 are you using? Perhaps it was a bug that is already fixed?

> If you need the source NWC file, I'd be happy to send it to you (I'd need an address, though).

Just remove NOTWAGNER, but you could also simply copy and paste a before and after.
For example, if I transpose
Code: [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Text|Text:"B"|Font:StaffItalic|Pos:6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Bar
|Text|Text:"C"|Font:StaffItalic|Pos:6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-2
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-1
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End
using  -4 C#, I get
Code: [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Text|Text:"G"|Font:StaffItalic|Pos:6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5|Opts:Lyric=Never
|Bar
|Text|Text:"G#"|Font:StaffItalic|Pos:6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-2
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-1
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End
88
General Discussion / Re: OWNERS MANUEL
Rik, if you are after a Reference Manual, you can freely download one that was written by several users a few years ago at http://nwc-scriptorium.org/command.html

Note that this is for version 1.70, but it will get you a long way. We are waiting for v2 to come out before revising, as it is a lot of work.

This website, the !(Noteworthy Scriptorium=http://nwc-scriptorium.org/) is a by-the-user-for-the-user website, with lots of resources. Check it out.
89
General Discussion / Re: are these 2 features interesting?
Don,
I hope you are still around.
Transposing of Text chords has been implemented by me using a user tool.
It is a PHP script, so you need NWC2 and also need to install the user tool toolkit

And then visit my User Tools page at http://nwc-scriptorium.org/nwc2scripts.html

There you will find instructions on how to set yourself up to use my Chord Transposition tool. It is written in PHP, so you can peruse the code to satisfy yourself that there are no nasties in it before running it.

Goeil's second request (tuplets) is still one of my most wanted features as well. I wrote a quick tool to implement the playback of septuplets and nontuplets (for a special request) but I truly believe that such things really need native implementation in NWC to look and sound right. I personally need 2, 4, 5, and 7 for most of my notations, but a generic would be fantastic.
90
General Discussion / Re: guitar chord letters
Jerry,

This is well outside the realm of Notation Processors, and I suggest you find a guitar tutor (real or book form, your choice) to help you with this.
92
General Discussion / Re: Version 2.0 Public Preview 1g
Robin & Arctic, there was a 1f, but it was very quickly superceded. Several of us are pushing the beta software hard at the moment - as a side-effect of user-tool development - uncovering some glitches that needed work, and asking for some goodies to make the user tools more user friendly. These fixes have all been documented in each new release that gets put up.

1f didn't get a big announcement.
It fixed a bug in user tools and blank staves, and introduced parameter passing
(NWC2 | Help | Command Reference | Tools Menu | User Tool)

(or on the web at
http://www.noteworthysoftware.com/nwc2/help/MNU_USERTOOLS.htm )

Your remaining question however, is a good one. Effectively:
"Is there a running list (history) of all changes introduced? (so that if something flies by we don't miss it)"
As cooperating members of a beta program, I think this sort of info needs to be easy to find.
96
General Discussion / Re: NoteworthySoftware.com RSS News Feeds
Got it now, thanks.
My mistake had been that I'd missed the XML/RSS logo at the bottom of the page, and so was just using the page itself for the RSS entry. May I suggest moving the RSS/XML logo to the top of those two pages?
Is there much difference between the two pages, btw?
99
General Discussion / Re: Clipboard Feature
I said:
"One little restriction at the moment is that "generators" such as yours (which is generating a clip from information translated from an external file), and one I'm writing at the moment, can't start with an empty staff."

Update 1e allegedly does this now, though I think there is a bug with it (reported), so let's look forward to 1f. :-)