I am planning to purchase the Noteworthy Composer soon. I have been using Cakewalk Home Studio 6.0 until now (it's too buggy, and doesn't have enough notation features.) Anyway, I was wondering if anyone was aware of a way to convert Cakewalk files directly to the Noteworthy format. I know that I could save the file as a MIDI in Cakewalk and Import it in NoteWorthy, but then I would lose my dynamic markings and such.
Thanks in advance,
Martin Goldman
No, unfortunately there isn't such a utility available. I have the same problem with files I had done using Cubasis (same problem, inadequate scoring capability). For awhile I was doing everything twice... Cubasis for the sound, and NWC for the scoring. But once I learned the finer points of NWC, I found I can get just as good (if not better) control over sound, and a lot faster too.
It would be wonderful if some enterprising programmer-type were to write conversions for Cakewalk *.wrk and Cubase *.arr files to NWC.
Fred
Typically, to write such a converter, two things are needed: documentation about the file format of the input (Cubasis, Finale, Encore, Cakewalk...) when it is not MIDI, and the file format of the output (NWC/NTW). Since there is a part of the protection scheme in the NWC files, I guess we couldn't be allowed to know all of the NWC file format; but in that case a format of the "private clipboard" could be enough (i.e. the output would not come into a file, but in the clipboard and you would just "paste" the results. But what if more than one staff ???)
About it, what is a ".kar" file ? (as Karaoke I guess???)
How good it'd be to know how to add plug-ins... I'm sure many programmers are ready out there. ;-)
NWC rules!
Yes, *.kar files are for karaoke.
They are basically a midi file with lyrics saved with one of the tracks. I have been checking out a lot of Karaoke creators/editors, but have found most of them to be not near as easy to use as Noteworthy. It would be nice if Noteworthy supported *.kar files.
Maybe we could put that on the wishlist?
doug
Thanks for the info. I just searched for .kar files and found some (look at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/surfin-charly/sframes/karaoke/karaoke.htm and follow the links at the bottom).
NWC support them (with FileImport) perfectly --for the music part. For the lyrics part, it's not (yet?) included, but I wonder how NWC'd know on which staff to place them.
For now, you can use a tool à la Unix such as "strings" to get the lyrics.
{get a "strings" tool (just to try, it's copyrighted) at http://homepages.infoseek.com/~marsu/strings.exe ; you can read the doc at http://homepages.infoseek.com/~marsu/strings.txt, but I recommend the following syntax :
strings -aN -n 2 YourFile.KAR > YourFile.txt
}
then cut and paste the lyrics into NWC.
If NWC could export to .kar too, it would be a good thing too (and that would allow NWC to be more known maybe :-) since many karaoke users can't read music, and are afraitd but this small dots and lines!
Hope this helps,
NWCly yours
In my experience Cakewalk is incapable of playing midi files correctly when the midi tempo exceeds about 240. This can result in fast music being played very slowly - I think the reason is because it uses an old format whereby the tempo is stored in a single byte rather than two bytes.
I'm assuming that cake walk can extract midi files. So why no expot a standard midi file then import the standard midi file in NWC