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Topic: Just a weekend story (Read 4448 times) previous topic - next topic

Just a weekend story

TL;DR: Life without NWC and NWCConvertor (a BIG shoutout for Opagust!) wouldn't be life - with a healthy dose of support by Audiveris. Here's my story of this weekend:

At hand:
- The full printed 72-page score ("score F") for a small orchestra (strings, winds, harp [with important segments], percussion) of a modern mass for SATB choir;
- also, a printed 40-page condensed score ("score P") for piano and SATB;
- finally, 40-page choir's score (only) in our own modified version for SSAB choir, written with Capella score editor ("score C"). This was created painstakingly and slowly by a colleague, reviewed and edited multiple times by our conductor, formatted by me to get a somewhat professional layout; thus, it deviates from the previous scores at quite a lot of places.

Todo - overdue, i.e. quickly:
- A full score for instruments strings and piano and our SSAB voices; and a piano score.

The idea is that the piano plays the voices from score F except the strings. Maybe half of it will come from the harp, some segments also from clarinets and flutes, rest "as necessary"; much copy-and-paste should be nice to get a rough result quickly.

First idea: Capella Scan (music scanning software for Capella) to scan both scores F and P, then append the string and harp and a few wind staves from score F to the existing Capella score C. Scans with Capella Scan looked good; but copying of full staves betwen scores crashed (the most uptodate version) Capella, and line-by-line copying of 72 pages times 4...5 staves = more tha 300 copy-pastes, with probably more thana handful of pasting errors thrown in, is not what I had in mind for just creating the raw version.

What did work, starting on Saturday morning:

1. Scanning scores F and P into PDFs.
2. Run the PDFs through Audiveris unattended and saving as MusicXML (but the lyrics got lost - I did not succeed in installing the necessary Tesseract OCR files).
3. Import into MuseScore 4 and re-export as MusicXML roughed out many many edges.
4. NWCConvertor then created NWCTXT files ready to be edited without a hitch.
5. A good text editor (I use UltraEdit) and some regular expression magic converted or removed many funny things (mostly invisible rests that came from Audiveris and MuseScore to even out measure lengths) in the NWCTXT files (I LOVE a line-based text format ... for this sort of jobs)
6. Copy-paste of the lyrics out of Capella did work; however, the text editor and its regexps were needed again to replace Capella's somewhat weird lyrics formatting to get simple NWC-like lyrics.

From there on, I did direct editing in NWC: Copy-pasting staves (all the strings, harp!) or parts of staves (clarinets!), and then also writing of a few hundred new measures. On Saturday evening, I attended another choir's concert. On Sunday at 9am, I continued; and at noon, I was done with writing out the notes. The standard process of adding sound and listening to the voices revealed quite a few missing clefs and accidentals - but by 3pm or so all sounded fine. Formatting for nice page boundaries took another two hours, and at 5pm, I sent out the full director's score.

Creating the piano scores from the same NWC score files took a few hours today - I use my PrintConfiguration.hmm objects extensively: It's really easy to quickly create voice scores (in this case, for piano with a cue staff) as well as re-create the full scores (because, of course, I found quite a few more quirks during this).

I'm now waiting for review remarks from the conductor and the piano player. After maybe two or at most three more turnovers, we can then print and bind the 70 pages for the conductor; and print the 15 piano pages.

H.M.

Re: Just a weekend story

Reply #1 –
I like working with regexps--they can be extremely useful.

You put in a good day's work on that.
Since 1998

Re: Just a weekend story

Reply #2 –
Harald, how were you able to use audiveris?
I tried many times but, even if I have the last audiveris and the latest JRE (updated automatically a few minutes ago), the result is always:
Quote
java version "1.8.0_411"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_411-b09)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 25.411-b09, mixed mode, sharing)

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Audiveris has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 61.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0
What I'm doing wrong?

Re: Just a weekend story

Reply #3 –
In short: You must manually install Java 17.

Background: Java versions are essentially different softwares, each with its own update path/history. You won't get from one to the other automatically. There are a few "LTS" = "long term support" Java versions, namely:
  • 8 - also written as 8u411 or 1.8.0-411 (411 is the build number, which will change with each upgrade)
  • 11
  • 17 - also written as 17.0.10... or the like
  • 21
"LTS" means that these versions will get security and bug fixes for a maybe decade or even longer. Thus, you have "the latest version 8" installed; but there will not be an automatic jump from 8 to 17.

(I think it's the same with e.g. Windows versions: You can have "the newest version of Windows 10" - i.e., with all the latest fixes -; but you won't be automatically upgraded to e.g. Windows 11; and other "more complex" software products, like database systems, IDEs, etc.etc.)

H.M.

Re: Just a weekend story

Reply #4 –
Gosh! But the official Java site, were I expected to find the real java platform, has only version 8, up to date, with no hint suggesting it's (very) old!  >:(
Looking at the Oracle page instead, I see "Java 22, Java 21, and Java 17 available now". No comment  :-X
And there is more: if you're looking just for JRE, like I do, in the Oracle page there is a button saying "JRE for consumers" and, guess what?, it sends you to the official java site with version 8...
Don't let me say what I'm thinking...

Quote from: hmmueller –
(I think it's the same with e.g. Windows versions: You can have "the newest version of Windows 10" - i.e., with all the latest fixes -; but you won't be automatically upgraded to e.g. Windows 11; and other "more complex" software products, like database systems, IDEs, etc.etc.)
Well, my daughter's computer surreptitiously switched from Win10 to Win11, with her great sorrow...  :(

Thank you very much, HM!

Re: Just a weekend story

Reply #5 –
Java has had a long and winding story. Oracle changed the licensing for Java in the middle of version 8, which is probably why later versions are harder to find. One of our vendors at work recommends Azul builds (https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#zulu), though the JDK is probably more than you need.
Sincerely,
Francis Beaumier
Green Bay, WI