I have a file for sfark, when I open this I get sfark.exe and click on this. I then get a window labelled sfArk Soundfont Compression. At the top of that window is a heading 'FILE' I click on this and then on 'OPEN' In the window which then appears I can search for a soundfont file and locate, say, a340sfArk Click on this and then on Open and it appears in the sfArk Soundfont Compression window under "selected files" Click on "Start" and it will decompress the file.
One of the first things to do if you have no sound is to open All Programs in the the Start menu, go to Accessories and then Entertainment> Volume Control and see that none of your Playback options is muted. If it is, uncheck it. Windows sometimes decides to mute Midi or other inputs.
I am a sole user, but before signing up to Noteworthy I tried more than 10 demonstration versions of other programs. In terms of usefulness and value for money, Noteworthy could not be beaten. It is a bargain.
I do not wish to insult the Asian helpers who come up so often on support lines. They are invariably polite and helpful to the best of their ability. But language usage differences and often the exchanging of lengthy Emails, can sometrimes be a very tiresome process. Often questions and answers have to be formatted in a precise way because of the way the support system works and I have found on occasion that this can be frustrating.
It would perhaps be helpful if you could get an Email to Creative and ask them for assistance. This is not easy to do but I eventually got to a Creative support site which offered the opprtunity of E-mailing if listed solutions were not appropriate.
I have printed out the manual. quite a lengthy task on my modest Canon printer. But I find that trying to work with a split screen is not on; the size of the print and the size of the Noteworthy scores both become too small for comfort on a 15" monitor.
In effect I have already applied the treatment to the original "Command Reference" for NWC 1 I was thinking of those who are taking up NWC2 for the first time amd are not necessarily computer experts!
I have only just got round to looking at the new User's Guide to NWC2 and I am very impressed with it. It should solve a lot of problems for new users (and indeed for some of us regulars!). It is a pity that it is such a lot of pages to print out if you want a paper copy to avoid having to keep swapping Windows screens. I wonder how much it would cost to produce as an optional purchase?
Skimming through this lengthy and erudite thread, I could not help but inwardly smile at the fact that a secondary school pupil in England can get a top grade pass in Music without being able to read music!
Bill comments that the organ is not really an orchestra instrument and in general this is true. But there are "church" organs and "concert" organs and some concert organs do have a fairly good orchestral capability. However this is a subject best avoided as strong opinions are held about these things.
The 'Creative Vienna Soundfont Studio' program gives the range of each of the organ stops in my various organ sound fonts. However this is the range of the sound font stop and how far it is accurate to the original is not known. Many organ sound fonts are derived from recordings of actual pipes, (as are sounds in electronic organs) but often only a few pipes are actually recorded, and the results are extrapolated to other pitches, which may range further or less than the original organ ranks..
There have been suggestions that a "proper" user manual ought to be prov1ided. Desirable as this is, for a budget priced program such a document would be too expensive. Typesetting, printing etc, and posting to buyers would be far more expensive than copying and posting a CD. But I hope that there will be an update of the "Command Reference" written for NWC 1.70 as soon as NWC2 reaches some sort of finality.
Reading up other people's experiences with Vista and both sound and video cards, quite a few are loading XP in additio0n to Vista and using dual booting so that they can use XP for certain programs. But this is a big thing to have to do. And you have to have room on the PC for the sound card.
Obviously we may all differ on what is an acceptable cost, but here in UK I can get a Creative Audigy SE7 PCI sound card for around £20 delivered ( Pixmania) This is the sound card I use on my PC and with a half decent speaker/amplifier setup the sound quality is very good I have a number of Pipe Organ sound fonts installed and they make a great difference to organ pieces played back on NWC.
I thoiught that I had posted a response to Bob's enquiry, supplementary to Richard's terse "nope", but it seems to have got lost somewhere along the line. I had intended to ask whether the enquirer was aware of the possibility of importing sound fonts, including orchestral fonts, provided your PC has a suitable internal sound cards such as most of the Creative 'SBLive' and 'Audigy' series.
I would be tempted to investigate whether I could replace Vista with XP on my laptop, but although this is not impractical with a desktop it may well not be possible with a laptop.
The Jeux sound fonts are very good. and there is an Itree available for them from the Scriptorium (which is quite helpful for creating a NWPatch for NWC1.75) If you have a good sound system linked to NWC and want to be bolder, Stefan's Cathedral Organ sound font has stops for 5 manuals and pedals and an ITree is also available for that. I believe that the Hammersound library is the best resource for obtaining sound fonts. and this includes a number of classical and cinema organ fonts, usually with some critical comment on them. But you probably already know this!
I may be wrong and I am sure that I will be corrected if I am not, but have you got the Organ Sound Font(s) in the Folder "NWTPatch configuration settings" in your main Noteworthy Composer folder? If you open this NWTPatch folder you will see on the left hand side a column, usually starting with something like this
[Patch Lists] General MIDI= Roland GS=
and followed by a list of each voice in the particular instrument bank. if your organ fonts are not listed in that NWTPatch folder NWC 1.75 will not be able to find and play from them.
Here is part of the NWTPatch entry for my "Jeux" organ font ( incidentally, one of the very best organ fonts)
Do you get the idea? If the organ fonts are not there you must edit the NWTPatch file by typing in the list of your organ voices in the form shown above, not forgetting to add the names of the organ fonts to that little list at the top of the column. The "=" signs are important; it means something to NWC 1.75 When you have done this and Saved the edited NWTPatch, go to a piece of music, hignlight a staff and depress the "I" key on your keyboard. Then click on Patch List Type in the window which comes up and you should find your organ fonts in the list from which you can select.
If this doesn't work come back to us.
Typing the list of stop names can be frustrating as you cannot usually directly copy them from the Audigy files and they disappear every time you start to type them on to something else!.
I admit to knowing very little about this subject, but do other keys function in the "normal" NWC manner? With other programs there have been problems because of differences between, for examplem UK and USA keyboard layouts.
I see that you have had no response yet to your pleas. I just wish that I could help you, but I cannot. However, I have found in the past on several occasions that members of the forums are very helpful and patient so do not despair
I have been notating an organ piece which has a lot of runs marked as 'staccato' But when played back in NWC the staccato effect is too pronounced. Because of the action of a pipe organ and the way in which notes are sounded, staccato is generally somewhat muted. whereas the play back, using an organ soundfont, is quite harsh. Not having found a way of modifying the NWC instruction, I have resorted to creating two staffs, one with staccato and one without, The relative dynamic levels of these can be adjusted to create a satisfying degree of staccato, but I believe that if I layer the staffs, I cannot have two differing dynamics.
Is there a simpler or a more sophisticated way of doing what I want?
An excellent site for free download of scores is the Icking Archive. There is a very comprehensive list of composers, though I cannot guarantee that what you want is there!
Ther are different versions of he score, depending on the score selected, such as a pdf score, and sometimes listen an MP3 recording or a Finale Notation version (which requires the free "Notepad for Finale" to play it)
In a single bar I have two notes with downward facing staffs, both minims (half notes). There are also three notes with upward facing staffs. a dotted minim and two quavers (eighth notes) Can I insert these and preserve the correct bar length without using layering? I don't want to use a single layered staff in a 9 page score!
An inconvenience with NWC2 is the necessity of having an instrument tree in a prescribed form before one can use a particular sound font. Whilst some sound fonts have data which can easily be used to write an itree, often one has to look at the soundfont in the sound font bank manager and copy the description of each instrument to a temporary document before one can write the itree. With my Creative sound font manager, one of the commonest in use, "Copy and Paste" cannot be used to copy the complete listing in a sound bank. This is a nuisance to me at the moment because after a PC failure i have lost my sound fonts and have to reload them. Whilst I have back-ups of the itrees for one or two, it is a long task to recreate the rest.
Fitzclan, A Creative Audigy 7 or similar sound card is available at a very reasonable price from a number of suppliers (for example, in UK, Ebuyer quote £23.63 including delivery) and has a Sound Font library capability. It is easy to install sound fonts. Used with a reasonable set of speakers -- I use a Trust set with a single woofer and two tweeters -- the sound quality is quite acceptable but if linked to a good Hi-Fi sytem is more than adequate for Noteworthy
I am not sure what the purpose of your setting is! It is an interesting sound and quite pleasant but very different from what I would expect to hear from a pipe organ. My personal preference would be to select suitable voices from a good Organ Font such as "Jeux"
My own very ad hoc solution is to import the tune, and having corrected the size, using the standard Noteworthy techniques, produce a blank page with the music at the top. Print this and you have the first stage. Then you measure how much space - the distance below the music to the bottom of the printable area of the page - there is below the music to fit the words in. Next the words are typed in on a blank document using a word processor program and again adjusted in font size and layout to fit the space as well as possible I then take my sheet with the music on, and fold it across below the music, and put it in the printer, crease down and blank side up, and print the words. Hopefully, when the sheet is unfolded I have the page I want. It is then a matter of scannong this and producmg a master copy for photocopying further sheets. And of course you can edit the music with Noteworthy, changing keys etc, before printing it out
There are probably far more sophisticated ways, but this only uses what knowlegde and software I already have
And do not forget that the quality of sound is no better than your speakers can reproduce. The built in speakers in a typical PC set up are very basic. If you only want to hear what you have written in order to edit or correct it then a farrly inexpensive system such as the Trust 3550 will suffice, but if you want Hi Fi quality then you will have to look at linking with your Hi-Fi system. My apologies if you know this already!
I had not noticed your reference to your age; I am 85½ and can manage to install an on board sound card and to load sound fonts with relative success! I may not always be right first time, but with help from the good friends of the forum I have always got there in the end.
Please read again my post, and look at Lawrie's last post.Do they not answer all your complaints? If not then I fear that we as a community may not be abe to help you much further.
I have a Creative Audigy sound card, which has been completely reliable for a long time; previously I used a second-hand Creative card which was equally satisfactory. But remember that a good sound card is still no better than the speaker system you are using. Most PC speaker systems are not very brilliant. Connection to your Hif Fi is good if it can be easily arranged - not always possible. i use a relatively cheap "Trust" PC speaker set which has two small high frequency units and a single Bass unit and it is surprisingly good, but it is not concert hall quality!
I ordered my Noteworthy CD in December 2002 and received it fairly promptly, the only fault being that our country's Customs demanded a hefty duty to be paid before I could get it. Since then I have regularly up-dated it and also obtained version 2 and its updates with no difficulty whatsoever. Yes, it would be nice to receive the very latest ion a CD but with a program thst is continually being improved and developed, a new CD would soon be out of date. As a community we all try to be pleasant and polite to each other; I find that you get better service that way rather than by complaining bitterly!
In all of this I can be sure only of one thing , that you are almost certainly right! My reactions are geting slower with age - we had an earthquake last night and I slept through it.
To those of us who have no competence whatsoever in blowing air into or at something and making a pleasant sound, it is amazing that there is no simplification of the system of writing music for these instruments or of altering the pitch to a logical character Tony
My belated thanks to you for the quick remedial measures. I.too. have tried to get news of vpmag from every conceivable source but it seems to have disappeared into outer space.
I could not contact Richard Woodroffe, my Email being returned undelivered. vpmag.com which hosts the scriptorium appears to be not available on line at the moment. Tony
You may be already aware of this, but I have found the "Command Summary" available as a download from the Scriptorium very helpful on this and similar matters. Although written for version 1.70 and sadly not updated, most of the advice given is fully applicable to current versions of Noteworthy Composer. As an irregular user of the program and thus liable to forget simple procedures I find it invaluable
I beleve tnat quite a few lovers of pipe organs find a delight also in steam locomotives. There are some similarities - mechanical complexity, visibilty of woking parts (often behind some sort of screening) and oftena nice and syncopated rhythm.