I just found the most amazing feature ...

2014-11-02 08:15 pm

Maybe you all know this already, but I just found the most amazing feature of NWC! A million thank yous to the developer(s) for the "Filtered Properties" feature - it saved me no end of time!!!

Imagine this: I had about 200 songs which were laid out on three staves - one for the melody, one of the remainder of the "right hand" accompaniment, and one for the "left hand". On the melody stave, I had inserted guitar chords as "text" above the stave.

Now, my task was to transpose the songs for alto saxophone. (For those who aren't familiar with transposing for the alto sax, the notes go up by 9 semitones, which is a lot!) When I simply transposed the melody line, a lot of the notes went so high that they crashed into the guitar chords. Oh, and the saxophonist in question had already said "Just leave out the guitar chords". So, I decided that I should really have these songs on four staves, adding one that contained only the guitar chords, so that I could choose when I print the music whether or not to include the chords.

Ok, that's a (relatively) simple task of duplicating the melody stave, replacing all its notes with rests, removing the chords from the original melody stave, and then collapsing the chords stave onto the melody stave. But when I did that, the guitar chords didn't seem to line up properly, and I found that I needed to choose the "Best fit forward" option for the text. I wasn't looking forward to having to select each item in turn and change that option ... and I discovered the "Filtered properties" feature. In case you don't know, this lets me operate on a filtered selection. I could simply select the whole stave, filter to just the text items, and then change that feature. I used the same method to select all the rests, and only the rests, on the chords stave and to set them to print only on single stave printouts.

This is a brilliant feature. I just wish I'd found it years ago. Thank you.

P.S. Just one question: is it possible to delete all the filtered items? When I've selected everything on a stave, can I delete all the text items, for example? I can't see how to do this with filtered properties. It seems to need a "Filtered delete" feature ...

Re: I just found the most amazing feature ...

Reply #1 – 2014-11-02 09:31 pm

I had no idea.
For tasks like this, I save my work as .nwctxt and then use a smart text editor to perform repetitive and/of complex tasks. But I can understand that not many are familiar with this approach.
Good for you though - and you may not be the only one with the Lightbulb Moment entitled "Why did I not discover this umpteen years ago?"

Re: I just found the most amazing feature ...

Reply #2 – 2014-11-02 09:34 pm

Quote from: TonyQ – 2014-11-02 08:15 pm

<snip>
P.S. Just one question: is it possible to delete all the filtered items? When I've selected everything on a stave, can I delete all the text items, for example? I can't see how to do this with filtered properties. It seems to need a "Filtered delete" feature ...

I use the user tool "Global_Modofocation" for this:
Text,some_selection_criteria DELETE

<edit> Hmm, clearly I'm having problems with my spelling this morning...

Let's try "Global_Modification"

Re: I just found the most amazing feature ...

Reply #3 – 2014-11-02 09:50 pm

Global Modofocation. That makes me think of a joke, but it might be off-limits.