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Messages - hmmueller

653
General Discussion / Re: Downgrade to 2.5.5
Quote from: Paul O –
Another point ( less important) is the layout of the new insert toolbar: less efficient then in 2.5.5
You could, if you want, customize it ...
... but being a efficiency freak myself - that's the whole reason I use NWC -:
(a) I wonder what is less efficient?
but
(b) for efficiency, I use almost only keyboard commands, so I do not really care for the toolbars ... Wouldn't that be the way to go?

Harald
654
Object Plugins / Re: PageTxtMaestro.nw
Ah ... right. I think that right now, I'll stay with my hidden and eXcluded bar, until I find the troubles it might create myself.

Thanks
Harald
656
Object Plugins / Re: PageTxtMaestro.nw
... I tried the hidden grace rest, but this creates, for me, a bad problem. When I start my staffs as follows ...

Code: (nwc) [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.75,Single)
|Clef|Type:Treble
|Key|Signature:F#,C#,G#,D#|Tonic:E
|User|PageTxtMaestro.nw|Pos:0|Class:StaffSig|Visibility:TopStaff
|Boundary|Style:NewSize|Upper:25|Lower:6|Visibility:TopStaff
|Rest|Dur:8th,Grace
|Boundary|Style:Reset|Visibility:TopStaff
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Title|Text:%Title%|Fnt:PageTitleText|YLoc:Top|XLoc:Center|PgCtrl:Once
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Author|Text:%Author%|Fnt:PageText|YLoc:Top|XLoc:Right|CY:10|PgCtrl:Once
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Lyricist|Text:%Lyricist%|Fnt:PageText|YLoc:Top|CY:10|XLoc:Left|PgCtrl:Once
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Copyright|Text:%Copyright1%%br%%Copyright2%|Fnt:PageSmallText|YLoc:Bottom|XLoc:Center|Visibility:TopStaff
|User|Acciaccatura.ms|Pos:0|Class:StaffSig
|TimeSig|Signature:3/8
|PerformanceStyle|Style:Legato|Pos:7.5
|Rest|Dur:Whole
|Bar
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

... then that first whole rest does not come out as a 3/8 rest, but as a 4/4 rest! :( ... Do you put some things (clefs, time signature, key, objects) at other places to circumvent this?

Harald

658
Object Plugins / Re: Slur.ms (1.1)
When I copied a "slur" object (ctrl-C, ctrl-V) to another position, I got the error

Slur.ms.nwcuser.lua:110: attempt to perform arithmetic on local 'x2' (a nil value)

in the "Alert Log."
(Moreover, I had to copy this text manually - it seems that it is not possible to copy-paste from the Alert Log :( )

Regards
Harald M.
660
Object Plugins / Re: PageTxtMaestro.nw
Spacing ... oh yes. So the final result is that I start each staff in all my templates with this one (the dummy bar is there to force the first boundary to take effect):

Code: (nwc) [Select · Download]
|User|PageTxtMaestro.nw|Pos:0|Class:StaffSig|Visibility:TopStaff
|Boundary|Style:NewSize|Upper:25|Lower:6|Visibility:TopStaff
|Bar|XBarCnt:Y|Visibility:Never
|Boundary|Style:Reset|Visibility:TopStaff
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Title|Text:%Title%|Fnt:PageTitleText|YLoc:Top|XLoc:Center|PgCtrl:Once|Visibility:TopStaff
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Author|Text:%Author%|Fnt:PageText|YLoc:Top|XLoc:Right|CY:10
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Lyricist|Text:%Lyricist%|Fnt:PageText|YLoc:Top|CY:10|XLoc:Left
|User|PageTxt.nw|Pos:0|PgStyle:Copyright|Text:%Copyright1%%br%%Copyright2%|Fnt:PageSmallText|YLoc:Bottom|XLoc:Center|Visibility:TopStaff

This should work ... thanks a lot!
Harald M.
662
Object Plugins / Re: PageTxtMaestro.nw
Thank you.

Re "turning off title info" - I assume that's now the suggested way: Create all the standard text with PageTxt objects.
Now, there's one problem - for which I have a solution, but is it the best one?: I print different scores from one NWC file controlled via "Page Setup / Contents" - e.g., conductor's score, choir's score, piano score (sometimes with soprano voice - where I'd like to have that small staff  :) ) etc. So that the title and copyright and author and lyricist appear on all these scores, I add the 1+4 objects to each staff and mark them as "Visibility: Top Staff Only". That works out quite nice ... (except that the title seems not to claim as much place as the "old title" did and hence sometimes moves too near to the top staff ... so be it).

Re "Manage Objects" - I admit that I overlooked this; and it took me a while to find out that right-clicking opens the important menu where you can install a new download (some text to this end would have been helpful). But this is exactly the feature needed - sorry that I implied you'd have overlooked that!!

Thanks a lot!
Harald M.
663
General Discussion / Tiny bug with placing accidental
On compound chords, an accidental is, IMHO, printed too far to the left - see attachment.
Code: (nwc) [Select · Download]
|Chord|Dur:4th|Pos:n-1|Opts:Stem=Up,Slur=Upward|Dur2:Half|Pos2:n-3,n-1

Regards
Harald M.
664
General Discussion / Re: (Minor) Upgrade to 2.75 deleted links to NWC
Yes, I feared that some "other magic" was going on ...
The program I used is nwcupd_from_v2.51.0.exe, downloaded from the page that I arrived at from NWC's Help-->Access ... menu item.

If you say the upgrade program does not change anything, most probably something is strange with my laptop (it is a company laptop with many company settings ...).

Regards
Harald M.
665
General Discussion / My 2 wishes: 1) small staffs 4) striked-through grace notes
A few months ago, I had three wishes. One of them was already possible back then (tightening the notes somewhat by spacers), one is possible with the PageTxt/Maestro object (copyright on each page).

One is still open: Small staffs.

And I have a new (last?) one: Grace notes that are striked through. Although it is possible to create them with careful placement of a dash (text) over the grace note, this is a nuisance; and almost impossible for grace chords or multiple grace notes that would need a longer or differently angled strike-through line. Striked-through grace notes have been a standard musical notation "since ever," so I would very much like to see them ...

Thanks!
Harald M.
666
Object Plugins / Re: PageTxtMaestro.nw
Two questions:

1. Regarding all these standard objects: How do I know whether the version that came with the 2.75 upgrade is the one that has been discussed here lately? Or, more constructively: I would like to see a version numbering for the standard objects - otherwise, I have to get all the objects from github and overwrite my current one, wouldn't I? (and I wonder whether for average end users, going to github is an option at all - is there some "bulk update mechanism" for objects?

2. Regarding this object: I want to use it to print the copyright info on each page (see https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=9138.0). Now, if I add PageTxtMaestro and PageTxt at the very beginning of my score, the copyright notice is printed twice on the first page (even if I put a bar between the two). Of course, I could put the PageTxt "a little later" (in the second measure) - but I'd like to add the two objects into all my templates, and there, of course, are not yet any measures - so I would have to remember to move the PageTxt to a later measure lateron. So either (a) can I put the PageTxt in a template so that it will show up only from page 2 onwards; or, alternatively, (b) could I somehow disable the "standard" printing of the copyright notice on page 1 even if a I add Copyright 1 and 2?

Thx a lot for any enlightenments!
Harald M.
667
General Discussion / Q re MIDI import
Sometimes, I want/have to import MIDIs that play "everything" (a choir arrangement; or a piano piece) on a single channel. Usually, there are of course overlapping notes in the different voices in such pieces, which NWC cannot import with correct length - it cuts off some notes (see attached example MIDI and import). I would be happy with a quite crude import which would place notes on quite a few staffs with simple heuristics - I would have to copy around snippets between staffs afterwards, of course, but at least the input would be correct. I even thought about writing a (more or less) simple tool reading in MIDI and producing nwctxt ... but before I do that, I try to summarize my question as follows:

Is there some facility for importing MIDI which
  • guarantees to keep the note lengths as in the original MIDI and
  • puts the notes into staffs "somewhat reasonably" (so that one can copy "longer" stretches of notes and move them around in after-editing)?

Thanks!
Harald M.
670
General Discussion / (Minor) Upgrade to 2.75 deleted links to NWC
After running the upgrade exe, I found that on my Win7 laptop, the two links to NWC on the desktop and in the program folder structure had vanished. I could easily repair this ("copy as link" to both places as admin), but others may see this as more of a problem ...

Regards
Harald M.
671
General Discussion / Re: How do you call this rhythm indication in some music scores?
It gets more and more interesting.

The "dotted breve = breve" notation is, as far as I know, usually classified as a tempo indication, not a rhythm indication: It relates the tempo of a previous part to the tempo of the following part. But your interpretation as a "dropped triplet notation" makes also sense, at least in modern terms! Historically, however, I am quite sure it has nothing to do with "triplets", but with the "perfect" and "imperfect" underlying rhythm - odd or even "time signature" in modern parlance - stemming from at least the 13th century.
I reverse myself: It has more or less "everything" to do with triplets, i.e. with rhythm - you are totally right here: This notation is used only for music notated "alla breve", i.e. the breves=half notes are the beats. But there are two possibilities:
  • Each breve is divided into two semibreves (quarters) - our standard "alle breve" = 2/2 =approx. 4/4, but with a "half beat feel"; and we of course have this also in modern times, not only at and before Frescobaldi:  - e.g. Gershwin's "s'Wonderful" if sung straight
  • Each breve is divided into three parts - e.g. "s'Wonderful" with swing!
This still correlates with the almost 1000 year old "perfect" (ternary - swung) vs. "imperfect" (binary - straight) reading of notation - but it certainly derives from two different base rhythms, not tempos. I learned something.

(Re notation - see e.g. the entry for "mensural notation" in the Wikipedia where it says:
Quote
Whether a note was to be read as ternary ("perfect") or binary ("imperfect") was a matter partly of context rules and partly of a system of mensuration signs comparable to modern time signatures.)

(Clarification:) And from this it follows that this sign has not been necessary as long as a breve was a breve, whether is was binary or ternary. Only when we changed the meaning (around 1600, I think) that a breve always contains two semi(!)breves, we had to notate ternary rhythm with dotted breves. But now, we needed a separate convention and, eventually, symbol to explain that the dotted breve actually was an "old undotted one", only split into three parts.

Here is another example of that sign, from one of the earliest German songs as notated in our contemporary hymn book:
<Image Link>
The interesting thing here is that, in contrast to the Frescobaldi example, the change of the "meter" happens in full flight, not between to clearly separate parts.
Incidentally, many modern scores of this song notate it (wrongly) in 6/4 and 4/4 and then moreover drop that sign, thereby leading choirs and conductors to keep the quarter beat the same throughout - which is absolutely wrong!

Re the tip hiding the "3"s in triplets, a famous example of a score that jumps between tripletted and normal eighths is the end of Buxtehude's Passacaglia in D minor. The last page of this score shows this - only a few of the triplets have a "3", the rest is obvious to the reader (from the fact that either 9 or 12 eighths are contained in a measure).

H.M.

672
General Discussion / Re: How do you call this rhythm indication in some music scores?
"Well", too ... I think you are not right on all accounts, so let me spell out what I think I know - I happily stand corrected wherever I'm wrong:

1. What you are talking about, are the notes inégales - a very interesting topic indeed. However, notes inégales where never indicated by the composer with such a sign - they were a mode of playing that was known by some players to be used with certain pieces (see the Wikipedia article - even if its contents are not definitely true, it shows the historical questions and insecurities about them - similar to questions about many ornaments which also often were implied and not notated).

2. Besides that, notes notated as dotted-eighth+sixteenth have, for a long time, been used as a kind of "shorthand" for the 2/3+1/3 split of a triplet, as can be seen in pieces by Bach, Bach's sons and up at least to Beethoven. But this has nothing to do with notes inégales (or shuffle or swing), but is just a notation - as can be seen in many cases where another voice plays triplets in parallel.

3. The symbol for shuffle/"swing" actually is two eights equalled to a triplet of a quarter+eighth ("crotchet"+"quaver"), because in jazz scores, eighths are used throughout (a dotted eighth+a sixteenth note, if it occurs at all, means an "especially sharply dotted rhythm").

4. The symbol you describe, with "a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth on the left side of the equal sign," I have never seen in any jazz or other score. It might be used in piano sheet music for beginners to indicate the shorthand I've indicated in item 2. above - but composers of that time would not (need to) indicate that with a special symbol.

If we disagree on this, we would probably have to start citing examples - I'll try to find a few in my heaps of piano and other scores that confirm or disprove what I said ...


Edit: For the fun of it, here are links to twelve scans from (only) two books of choir arrangements (one German, there is a piano acc. book and the choir book; and one American) - just click on the links and have fun with the inconsistencies and also how some of the scans disagree with my items:


Edit one day later: I think I have to modify my claim 3 above: The shuffle/swing notation using pairs of eighths seems to be a more "recent" (60s or later) development. At least the "classical jazz composers", starting with Jelly Roll Morton, then Gershwin, Cole Porter etc. used the dotted eighth+sixteenth notation to indicate "swing" - I know that I have Morton and Gershwin scores somewhere notated like that. Still, I cannot remember having seen any sign that would inform the reader that this rhythm is to be played more "triplet-like" - I think it was "obvious"/"implied" like the notes inégales a few centuries earlier.

H.M.
673
General Discussion / Re: How do you call this rhythm indication in some music scores?
Mea culpa, as they say: I lead this thread on an off-topic track with that talk about sound fonts and the like - do not worry about that! It might maybe become a problem - but on the other hand, everything may work just fine (as it did for me for many pieces I wrote)!
Just use whatever Noteworthy gives you to write your music.

(I will write a concrete text about the possible problems and my solutions "somewhen" - maybe in July -, then you can check whether this is of any interest at all for you ...).

H.M.
674
General Discussion / Re: How do you call this rhythm indication in some music scores?
Quote from: Lawrie Pardy –
Umm, H.M., I'm not sure the soundfonts have any relevance ...
Yes, it's a somewhat weird claim, I know. When I have more time (not right now), I'll try to show in a demo project why I believe this (in a nutshell: When I modified the attack values in the sfz definitions, notes started to appear or disappear at some places, but not at others) - but maybe such a "controlled experiment" might also show that I'm wrong, and there is some other effect ...

H.M.
675
General Discussion / Re: How do you call this rhythm indication in some music scores?
The problem of those soundfonts and/or Reaper are probably not the zillions of MIDI message per se, but the concrete messages that line up perfectly with notes (I guess). In the ritartando example, usually a note is playing "over" a tempo change ...
... but all that's only guesswork. Also in my case, many notes played correctly - only a noticable amount (20% or so) had a strange loudness.
I just wanted to point out that that conductor's staff might produce problems in some cases, for which one needs then more "creative solutions" ...

H.M.
676
General Discussion / Re: How do you call this rhythm indication in some music scores?
There is one "caveat" (problem?) with the conductor staff: If you export a MIDI of such a Noteworthy score (with hundreds of tempo changes), the software reading down the line might not be really happy. Some sound fonts I use get problems with the "attack" parts of notes, which makes the notes more or less inaudible; and/or at least (the DAW) Reaper seems also to get lost with notes playing at such varying tempos.
The solution (with which I am completely happy) is to let Noteworthy play the score and send the MIDI to the DAW (e.g. via loopMIDI).

(It might very much be that I do not yet understand sound fonts enough, and so that behavior may well be "right" - still, for me, it was a problem ... the more so because the forums of Reaper and the like will tell you quite decidedly that you should use "their" note entry feature ... ahem).

H.M.
679
General Discussion / Re: My 3 wishes: 1) small staffs 2) fine-scale note-width 3) copyright on each page
Thanks for your reply -

Re the slurs, good to hear this. I recently skimmed through Elaine Gould's "Behind Bars" - I'd by happy to try some of what is written there with slurs ... but of course I would never demand or even want that Noteworthy becomes a tool that can do "all that": Keeping it at a "perfect minimal feature set" is very crucial! I think I will somewhen document how composing - as opposed to writing a score - with NWC works, which depends on that property of NWC that it does not require me to think about formatting and "musical correctness" (e.g. correct number of quarters in a bar) - I can just "write along", in contrast to almost all other tools. The real efficient way of writing, using a few helper staffs, took me a few years to find that out (maybe I'm slow) ... but now I'm very very (very!) happy with it.

Re the smaller staffs - well, then I heartily hope that we can convince the NWC guys (and girls) to do this!

Re spacers - oh yes, I noticed this behavior already sometimes, but pushed it away as "somewhat weird". I'll try whether it is good enough for what I want.

Re "user plugin for repeated footers," I'll eagerly wait for your result!

Thank you very much!
Harald
680
General Discussion / My 3 wishes: 1) small staffs 2) fine-scale note-width 3) copyright on each page
As a long time user of NWC, I'm very happy with it - I use it to compose music (without a connected MIDI keyboard - I mostly think in musical notation), arrange for our choir and for crank organs, sketching snippets in forums, and rewrite clumsy parts for easier playing or singing.

Many features that others may need I am happy without: This keeps the tool small and efficient. And I'm not very concerned about the perfect beauty of the result - for example, I had no great complaints about those slurs which curve "in interesting ways".

But there are three things I'd dearly need, in descending order of importance:


1. Smaller scales - almost all instrument parts need either a few stretches or full staffs of cue notes. Currently, I use normal staffs with diamond note heads (which look a little bit like smaller note heads). But a vertical scaling is very much needed.

2. Finer-scaled "Extra Note Spacing" that takes tenths instead of only integral values; and negative values up to maybe minus 1. Sometimes, in a little more complex chords assembled on 2 layered staffs, just shifting over a note "a little bit" would make the chord really readable. And, sometimes, I'd like to push notes together a little bit, usually in a scale or a repetitive acc. pattern: This might save that unncessary fourth page where just 2 measures spill over, and still keep the score perfectly readable.

3. Printing fixed text on each page would also be great - for copyright purposes, but more for title and instrument remarks. I usually prepare all the different printouts (instruments, singers, conductor's score) by creating PDFs on my laptop during my (train) commute. Then I print all of the PDFs together - so inserting different paper is no option. But maybe I have to look into some batch tooling that adds footers into PDFs easily.


If I got these features (only two, maybe only the first), I'd happily pay for a new complete license - NWC has paid itself over so many times that I would not complain about another bunch of $ (or €) for that!

Harald M.

P.S. Off-topic, but not really - it shows again what can be done with NWC: For an example of a recent piece I wrote: http://www.hmmueller.de/MyMusic/20150522-p+2Fl.SlowAndFast.mp3 (generated with Reaper and 'Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra' Soundfonts), score at http://www.hmmueller.de/MyMusic/20150522-p+2Fl.SlowAndFast.pdf. A score with my current "cue notes" is at http://www.hmmueller.de/MyMusic/20150522-p+2Fl.SlowAndFast_FLOETEN2.pdf ...
683
User Tools / Re: hmm_ShowRanges.php: A small new tool for checking and visualizing note ranges
Hi - I feared (and expected) this answer :-) ... All "hardware" (packages, floppy disks, CDs??) related to NWC2 have, over a few moves - even over continents - long vanished "somewhere". The question thus is: How can I get these data again? (I could claim that my cellar was drowned by a flood - as was my parents' -: certainly there is a way to recapture these data in such a case? - and no, not everything in my house is backed up with copies, as even insurance companies accept other, more indirect proofs than only the insurance certificate ...). Thx anyway!
Harald
(BTW: Preview of posts also does not work for me - the browser says "Fetching preview..." for an indefinite time. Post, as you can see, works :-) )
684
User Tools / Re: hmm_ShowRanges.php: A small new tool for checking and visualizing note ranges
Hi all again -

To find the description - including the download page - of my tool, you can simply search in Google for "hmm_ShowRanges" - it will find only one page in the whole wide world :)
(So far, only Google finds it, as I have posted the description in Google's blogspot site).

I tried to post the code as suggested by Warren - but the forum also says "Sorry, links are not permitted ..." :-(

Regards
Harald

685
User Tools / hmm_ShowRanges.php: A small new tool for checking and visualizing note ranges
Hi all -

I have written a small tool that helps to visualize notes on a system that are outside a given range.

I'd like to post a link to its description and download area here - however, I get a message that I cannot post links here ... so if someone is interested, please leave me a PN (and if anyone could tell me how to "upgrade" my membership so that I can post links, that would be nice).

By using the nwc2clips PHP library, the tool handles arbitrary clefs adn accidentals; and can visualize multiple ranges at one time by chaning note colors or noteheads. In my scores, I usually use two ranges,
  • one smaller "convenient" (for singing or playing) range
  • and one larger "full" range, which can be played or sung with some effort.
The tool thus helps to find quickly areas where one might have to revise an arrangement for easier playing/singing.

If the tool is useful for anybody, and/or if anyone would like to remark on it, point out bugs or possible improvement, I'd be happy!

Best regards
Harald M. Müller
686
General Discussion / Re: Problems with customizing toolbars
What do you mean by "Error" buttons?

The only "erroneous" buttons I saw are 6 weird "Selector" buttons in the Insert toolbar. Internally, they are called Selector11...Selector16.

I could remove them (so that they stayed away also after a restart) by
* first simply removing them (View-Toolbars-Customize-etc.)
* then selecting "Save All" - I have no idea whether this was necessary, but it didn't hurt ;)

Regards
Harald
688
General Discussion / Song templates in 2.51
Sorry if this has been asked before ...
I just upgraded to 2.51, and now there is no place where I can set the template folder. Under Tools/Options/Folders, I see only 5 entries:

Song Files
Backup Files
Config Files
Auto Save/Recovery
Instrument Trees

As my Templates reside at a specific place, I'd need to point there ...

Thanks for any help!
Harald