Now You Can Print Out the Music!

Subject: NOW YOU CAN PRINT OUT THE MUSIC!
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 10 Sep 97 - 01:42 PM

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.

Subject: RE: NOW YOU CAN PRINT OUT THE MUSIC!
From: Joe Offer
Date: 11 Sep 97 - 03:53 AM

Dick & Max, I don't think any of us can find the MIDIs with this new URL. If you go to a set of lyrics and click the "play" button, you get no response. I'm sure many of us can type in the proper location until Max can fix the links, but where the heck is it?

By the way, I saw a notice on rec.music.folk that quoted you as saying deltablues.com was working. It ain't. The only URL that works that I've been able to find is
www.onstagemedia.com/mudcat.I posted a correction. So, you should join us in "chat" sometime. That's working fine, as is most everything but the MIDIs.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: NOW YOU CAN PRINT OUT THE MUSIC!
From: Joe Offer
Date: 11 Sep 97 - 03:55 AM

Is the bold type off now???? Aaaargh!!!

Subject: RE: NOW YOU CAN PRINT OUT THE MUSIC!
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 11 Sep 97 - 10:47 PM

Joe- I, sadly, am working with a Jurassic 386 with only 4 mB of memory: the chat room just doesn't seem to work for me. I'll talk to Max about the MIDI links; I assume that whatever difficulty we're encountering is temporary.

Subject: RE: NOW YOU CAN PRINT OUT THE MUSIC!
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 13 Sep 97 - 07:48 PM

Just sending this back to the top for those who've asked me about printing.