PRINTING MUSIC (part 1)

A few months back, the Mudcat Café instituted MIDI playback of the songs for which we have music. This supplemented the existing music players for those who downloaded the entire Digital Tradition database, and permitted those who prefer to do their searches on the Web to hear the tunes.

We've received a large number of requests from folks who would like to print out the tunes in conventional music notation. This has always been possible with SongWright, which has the capabilities of reading tunes in its own format or in MIDI, playing the tunes either on the computer's beeper or through a MIDI interface or a sound card. SongWright, though, costs $100 or so; for those who wish to work with music composition or editing, it's a bargain, we feel, but it's a bit steep just for those who want to print out scores.

We've found a neat shareware program—Noteworthy Composer 1.3—that will import a MIDI file, play it for you (emulating a vast selection of instruments) if you have MIDI capabilities, transpose it to any key and print it out. It runs under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. It can be downloaded from:

www.ntworthy.com

Installation, on a couple of platforms we tried, was very easy.

Here's how you use it:

When you click on the blue section at the bottom of the lyrics that says, "Click here to play," hold down the shift key. This will download the tune (in MIDI format) instead of playing it. You then open Noteworthy, import the MIDI file you wish to play, and follow instructions. Piece of cake. We'll be reporting on some other neat programs for printing, playing, transposing, arranging, editing and even selecting chords from MIDI, SongWright and ABC formats in the very near future. Watch this space.

PS: I'm putting a copy of this notice in the "NEWS" section.