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Messages - PhilHolmes

53
General Discussion / Re: On the Road
Noteworthy runs perfectly happily on my under-powered notebook.  What sort of suggestions are you looking for?
54
General Discussion / Re: Help with MusicXML!
I can confirm that I have never had a problem with missing accidentals whilst importing MusicXML files to Noteworthy, so I would suspect the Sibelius export.
55
General Discussion / Re: Placement of two chord members of the same (overlapping) note pitch
The rules concerning merging the noteheads of different notes are more complex than this.  It's covered in Elaine Gould's book on page 52.  Generally, black noteheads can be merged, since the presence/absence of flags makes the length obvious.  Noteheads where the notes have the same value can be merged.  Open notes (minims, etc.) should be kept separate from other open notes of different duration and from black headed notes.
56
General Discussion / Re: Overlaying parts
I'd understand if you don't want to do it this way, but my NWCTXT2LY tool does this kind of thing pretty much automatically, by using Lilypond to do the typesetting.  Google for nwctxt2ly to find the page with the instructions.
58
General Discussion / Re: Uneven ladder...
Elaine Gould's new-ish book - "Behind Bars" is gaining good traction as the new music typography bible.  She says, for close packed chords, "Place the highest accidental closest to the chord, followed by the lowest, moving left from the chord and alternating the remainder between highest and lowest."  So she agrees with Alfred.  Trust everyone else does, too.
59
User Tools / Re: NWC to LilyPond
Have you tried entering a descriptive bit of text in the Part Name box?  This should distinguish between the other files it creates.
60
Version 1.75 Discussion / Re: SEPERATING A FILE
Just to be explicit about how to do this.  Select the top file you want to move.  Then use the scroll bars on the side of the window to scroll down to the bottom file you want to move, then hold down the shift key and click that file.  You'll then have selected all the files you want to move.  Then drag them all to the folder where you want them.
64
General Discussion / Re: Dumb question, but ...
To set up bar number, go File, Page Setup, Options, Staff Labels.

To correct the Dnat to D#, place your cursor after the note, on the 4th line of the staff, level with the D.  Hit Ctrl-Backspace to delete the upper Dnat.  Hit the 9 key on the keypad to turn on sharps.  Hit the 3 key to make sure you enter a quarter note.  Hit Ctrl-Return to add a new note to the chord.
66
General Discussion / Re: Dumb question, but ...
With the accidentals - I wonder whether this is actually a chorded note - i.e. a single stave, with both a D# and a Dnat on the same line.  NWC happily accepts this, but when you select it, there's no option to change the accidental.  The solution is to delete one of the notes (Ctrl-backspace) and then put it back in correctly (Ctrl-return).
70
General Discussion / Re: Converting .nwc files to .ly (on Ubuntu)
I think this question has already been answered on the LilyPond user mailing list, and I still haven't got around to upgrading my membership here to allow me to post URLs.  However, a Google for lilypond nwctxt will lead you directly to my web site with my NWC to LilyPond converter.  You can also find a number of references to it on this site by searching for LilyPond.  Good luck.
71
General Discussion / Re: Beta versions
Thanks for the answer.  I was aware of the copy on the forum - it's just that it's not shown in a way most of the members of my society would recognise as a download.  I was hoping there would be a "Beta versions" page on the noteworthysoftware web site, but it seems there isn't, from what you say.
72
General Discussion / Beta versions
I've browsed the postings and know that there is a beta version of Viewer 2.5, which supports pause.  Is this only available as a download from the message board, or can it be got at by members of the public (e.g. my music society) from the main Noteworthy web site?
73
General Discussion / Re: music recognition/transcription?
I wasn't intending to suggest that (in anything like the medium term, at the very least) any and all musical performances will be seamlessly transcribed to musical notation, in the same way as I know to my cost that many musical performance sheets require a lot of messing about with to re-represent them as a new score.  Simply to say that something like, say, a straightforward string quartet could well (at some point in the not too distant future) be recognised by computer and given a fair representation in musical notation.  This is pretty much where optical recognition is now.  In other words, I don't subscibe to the view "it will never be possible to convert mp3 to midi".  I do subscribe to the view "there will be lots of MP3s that are too difficult to transcribe accurately and automatically".
74
General Discussion / Re: music recognition/transcription?
Quote from: William Ashworth –
First of all, Phil, harmonics aren't just multiples of the original frequency - they're fractional multiples. Straight multiples only produce octaves (220, 440 and 880 are all A's). The overtone series has octaves, fifths, fourths, thirds, seconds, and some intervals we don't have names for.

What I said wasn't quite accurate, but neither is this.  The harmonics are categorically only straight multiples of the fundamental.  Thus if we play a low A (110 Hz) we get all the multiples of 110 Hz in varying degrees.  So we get 220 Hz (the next A), 330 Hz (approximately E above the A), 440 Hz (the next A), 550 Hz (approximately C) and so forth.  We get no other frequencies in between.   Therefore, if I provide the waveform from an instrument playing the low A, it's easy to determine that this is the fundamental being played.  Similarly, if I provide the waveform of one instrument playing a low A and another playing a low C at the same time, a Fourier transform makes it plain that this is what's being played by both instruments.  As I've said, I'm not downplaying the difficulty of doing this with multiple instruments and a time-varying waveform, simply that (in contrast to what's quoted below) it is a computationally difficult problem, but not impossible.  Unscrambling eggs is impossible and is a poor analogy.

Quote from: William Ashworth –
Second, instrumental timbres are averages: one clarinet rarely sounds exactly like another, because their overtones don't match exactly. Third, our brains don't operate computationally.

This is not relevant.  The different timbres come from the varying proportion of the harmonics - 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.  But these all still exist at the straight multiples as descibed above.  It seesm to me that characterising an instrument (like training voice recognition) would make it easier to identify the fundamental of that instrument and remove all the higher harmonics, thus simplifying the problem of identifying the other instruments, but this is an improvement, not necessary.

Quote from: William Ashworth –
There is a large body of hard scientific evidence that they operate by gestalt - that patterns are grasped as wholes rather than as the sum of their parts. This isn't a computational problem, it's a problem in pattern recognition. For that, the ear and brain operating together are much better than a computer.

Whan I was a lad, we were often told that chess requires human intelligence and that a computer will never beat the best men.  This has been shown to be incorrect.

Quote from: William Ashworth –
I can almost always sort the cello part out of a string ensemble, even when it goes higher than the violins (for an example of that, check the Shostakovitch op. 69 trio). My wife (who is a string player) usually cannot. I seriously doubt that a computer will ever be able to do it.

I'm fairly certain it will.  In the first instance, I would expect the the computer will simply identify the tones, rather than the instrument playing.  I do think that it will also be possible to do both at some point.
75
General Discussion / Re: music recognition/transcription?
Quote from: William Ashworth –
I'm not surprised to read the negative reviews on Amazon. Lawrie is right: the problem is akin to unscrambling an egg. I have serious doubts that it will ever be satisfactorily done.

I don't believe this.  It's not unmixing something - that's well known to be impossible.  See below.

Quote from: William Ashworth –
What makes a clarinet sound different from a kazoo is the overtone structure of the sound - which of the partials of a given note (the high notes that are sounding softly from an instrument) are sounding how loud in relation to the fundamental (the note you actually hear the instrument producing). Sorting out which instrument is producing any particular partial is a next-to-impossible task.

Each note played only produces harmonics - i.e. multiples of the original frequency, and these diminish quite sharply as the frequency rises.  So a violin playing middle C will produce some C above middle, soem C above that, and so on.  It should be possible to recogise the patterns of specific instruments and match these to the frequency distribution.  As I said, it's not easy, or it would have been done, but it can't be computationally impossible - we do it, and we only have ears and a brain to hear and calculate.
76
General Discussion / Re: music recognition/transcription?
It's clearly theoretically possible to convert played music to a list of the notes.  In the simplest example of a single line - no chords or polyphony - then a Fourier transform of the music will give a set of frequencies, and a time analysis of those will give notes and durations.  In principle, there's nothing stopping this from being performed with polyphonic music - the transform will now give a set of frequencies - these are complicated by the fact that each note has harmonics, but it should still be possible to analyse them to the original notes with fair accuracy.

The question for us on this forum is - would this be worth it?  Most of us are trying to create music (which wouldn't benefit from the above) or recreate something from the original.  Generally, the original was written music and the layout will be complex - many voices, slurs, ties, accidentals, key changes, etc., etc.  This complexity will be very poorly represented in the performed music, and so any transcription from that performed music will be a very poor representation of the original.

So I'll stick to starting with the printed music....
77
General Discussion / Re: music recognition/transcription?
I use SharpEye quite extensively.  It works very well on excellent images of well engraved music.  Its accuracy gets progressively worse as the quality of the scan/music degrades.  Its interface is quirky, but once you're used to it (and the keyboard shortcuts) you can make corrections quite quickly.  I think you already know that it exports MusicXML and its ability to understand different voices and put these into layered staves is pretty good.
78
General Discussion / Re: Showing Chords for melody
Automatic chord display is one of the many things that LilyPond does "out of the box", although it only recognises non-inverted chords.  Together with my program that converts NWC to Lily, it should be quite simple to get this working, providing the layout of the score is not too complex.

www*philholmes*net/software/ has a link to my converter (change * to .).  Google LilyPond for a view of what that free, open-source program can do.
81
General Discussion / Re: Composer <--> Sibelius file conversion?
Has anyone considered using MusicXML as an intermediate file type?  You can translate both Noteworthy and Sibelius files both into and out of musicXML, although I don't know how well these all work.  See www*recordare*com/musicxml/community/software (*) for further information.

* - replace the asterisks in the link with dots.
82
General Discussion / Re: Importing a hard copy
I do use Sharpeye quite extensively.  It's pretty good with clean scores.  With most of the "not clean" ones I have it takes a fair bit of correction, which I generally do mostly in Sharpeye.  The way it works is pretty idiosyncratic, but once you've got used to it, it's OK.
83
User Tools / Re: 64-bit mxml2nwc available
Does anyone know if Nicholas is continuing to develop mxml2nwc?  I use it and like it a lot, but it doesn't seem to handle multiple lyric lines in the version I have.
84
User Tools / Re: NWC to LilyPond
Quote from: Haymo –
Will have to learn how to use Lilypond properly,
to get at those features which Noteworthy cannot (yet) handle.

The later versions I use for my own benefit implement a fair number of Lilypond features that Noteworthy doesn't.  If you have specific requirements, please let me know.
85
User Tools / Re: NWC to LilyPond
Quote from: Haymo –
1. NWCTXT2ly.exe is hard-coded to produce a *.ly file, with header section which starts:

% Generated by NWCTXT2Ly C# version 1.0.1.1 by Phil Holmes
% Based on nwc2ly by Mike Wiering

\version "2.8.0"

The version available for download with your link, calls itself:
lilypond-2.12.3-1.mingw.exe

Question: Should I manually change the version, if the *.ly file is to be kept for a longer period?


My understanding is that the version number tells LilyPond of the minimum version needed - so if you put version 2.8.0 and run version 2.12.3 it works fine.  That's what I do.

Quote from: Haymo –

2. After working through the samples which you provide,
I noticed that quite a large number of temporary files had been created.
Would it be feasable for NWCTXT2Ly.exe to create a \temp folder where these could be collected?


Quite a few of these are produced by LilyPond, so it's not really feasible.  The simplest way is just to put the test files in a folder you won't use in the future, and delete them if you don't want them.
87
General Discussion / Re: Feature request: marcato marking
Quote from: William Ashworth –
Marcato is currently available in NWC as a performance style. Since marcato playing usually is called for over a complete passage, or at least over several notes (in contrast to accents, which are often just on single notes), I can live with this. The few times a note must be marked individually can be handled with text entries. IMHO, There are far more important things for Eric to concern himself with.

I (probably along with a great many other people) partially use Noteworthy to reproduce scores in order to re-use them.  It's therefore important to me that Noteworthy supports commonly used notation - and in almost any classical music, a marcato mark over/under the note is very common.  It's therefore very frustrating to me that NW does not support what must be a tiny variation in the program since it already supports the 3 similar features previously discussed.
88
General Discussion / Re: Converting PDF to Noteworthy
Lilypond does not have a GUI.  When installed, simply double clicking the lilypond file (.ly) or running "test.ly" from the command prompt or a batch file creates the PDF.
89
General Discussion / Re: Feature request: marcato marking
Quote from: Randy Williams –
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but perhaps you might want to document here what you're expecting, so if you ever get this feature, you'll get what you're expecting!

I think possibly you are :-).  From my perspective, I don't think I've ever seen marcato set with accent or tenuto or whatever on a single note, but TBH I wouldn't care whether it was allowed or not.  If it's allowed, I can see it and turn off the other marking.  If not, I wouldn't miss it.  Also, from my perspective I wouldn't really mind whether it's performed or not - it's not as obvious as staccato and so wouldn't really matter.  It's really just a case of being able to notate with a really, really, really common notation.
90
General Discussion / Re: Converting PDF to Noteworthy
Quote from: Randy Williams –
How about the other direction - is there any way to bulk convert NWC to PDF?  There is nwc-conv, which gets you from NWC to NWCTXT.  Then I think there's utilities to get from there to MusicXML or LilyPond or something else?  (Sorry if I'm remembering these other formats wrong.)  Then is there anything out there that can generate PDF from these other formats, using command line parameters?

LilyPond automatically generates PDF as its "normal" output.  My Noteworthy->LilyPond converter has, as an undocumented feature, the ability to take an NWCTXT file as a command-line argument, so you could write a batch file to autoconvert NWC to PDF - providing the NWC isn't too unusual for my converter to handle.
91
General Discussion / Re: Converting PDF to Noteworthy
Quote from: Richard Woodroffe –
Phil,

Correct me if I'm wrong - but I think that Sharpeye (last time I checked) does not read in pdf files, only tif and bmp.



Correct - but it's pretty easy to convert PDF to any image file type - the simplest being to display the PDF on screen and take a screen shot.  I happen to have a licensed copy of the PDF995 software which will also convert a printed image to a TIFF.
94
General Discussion / Re: Is it possible to make note spacing proportional to their duration?
I think we should accept that Noteworthy is a notation programme, not a music typography one, and limit our expectations of its layout and print out.  If you want well laid out music, I'd advise using Lilypond, as I do.   From my perspective, I'd far rather have additions that improve its ability to notate (like the additions of Marcato, as I requested earlier) than anything to do with print-out.
95
General Discussion / Feature request: marcato marking
I've done a search and found that this has been suggested before, but I don't believe it has yet been implemented.  Noteworthy supports staccato (dot), tenuto (line) and accent (greater than sign) but not marcato (top hat/caret sign).  It would seem not too hard to support, given that the others are there.  Could I request it be included as a candidate for the next build?