Technical help

Subject: Technical help
From:
Date: 15 Jan 98 - 06:26 AM

Just read Joe Offer's discussion to downloading and creating files. Thanks. I think that many of us could benefit from a "Tech Tips" icon at the Mudcat. These "how to" tips could include:

"How to post songs/lyrics"

"How to create a "click here" section in a thread to lead the reader to a particular site"

"How to use "br" to indicate the end of a line"

etc. These tips should be easily printable to produce a
Step 1, Step 2, Step 3...set of instruction for accomplishing a given task. Then those of us who need it could each have our own "book"

Those of you who know how do do these things add tremendously to the enjoyment of this site. Imagine if everyone did the same.
Thanks for listening.

DW

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: sharon
Date: 15 Jan 98 - 03:44 PM

I agree. I've spent an evening scouring my manual and making one error after another trying to figure out how to do something............. Then someone more computer wise than I tells me........Oh, all you needed to do was.......

Any tips would be so greatly appreciated.

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Joe Offer
Date: 15 Jan 98 - 10:40 PM

Hi, DW. On the main forum page, after the name of each thread, there's a link that says "add to tracer." I think those links only appear for registered users. If you click that link, you can put that thread on your personal page, and refer to it whenever you like. This is a good little trick for tracking that technical stuff you want to remember, and also for lots of other things. If I post a thread and don't get a good answer, I can put the thread on my tracer, and then just refresh the thread a month later and hope for an answer - that's better than creating a new thread every time.
But ya gotta register, which is painless and free of charge.

Another hint - to find the best tech advice, do a forum search for messages posted by Alan of Australia, formerly known as Alan of Oz. When it comes to tech advice, he's the man. If you read the instructions he's written up for his MIDITXT programs, you'll see that Alan is actually.....
literate.
Uh....I couldn't resist.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: dwditty
Date: 16 Jan 98 - 06:04 AM

Thanks, Joe. See, I knew there was a simple answer. I am registered - in fact I brag about my "membership" in the Mudcat to almost everyone I meet. I will start keeping all tech-related threads handy. on my personal page. Thanks again.

DW

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Bill D
Date: 18 Jan 98 - 01:17 PM

still, I wish Max would consider using DW's idea to consolidate all the helps and hints with a single icon link...it takes so long to figure out all the tricks that one needs and where to go for them...for instance, I posted this link a while back to the intstructions on how to do a search of the database...click ...as it is, the only link to it is in a place that you can totally miss unless you compulsively press all little blue words like I do...on the main page it says, right under 'FEATURES', 'search the digital tradition folksong database' etc..if you click that, you get a 'search' page with a lot of words besides the search box....and at the very bottom, in small print it says "Please read About The Digital Tradition and Searching Digital Tradition. " with blue words...and if you bother to click THAT, you actually find the instructions and examples which could help some of the new folk before they get frustrated....if this link was part of a general page on how to do all the things DW suggests, and the icon to get there was very obvious on the forum page, all this repetition would not be necessary. Sure, it all seems SO simple after we have done it a few times, but so does playing a 'barred F' on the guitar....oh...!! no that's a bad example...*grin*

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: dulci-folk
Date: 19 Jan 98 - 10:25 AM

Hi - Is there a way to access just traditional tunes (not songs)in this site? I'm looking in particular for Scottish/Irish/Gaelic tunes. Would you please send your response directly to me at [e-mail]? Thanks! Holly Williams

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Joe Offer
Date: 19 Jan 98 - 01:44 PM

Holly, I'd try The ABC Home Page. There are lots of links to libraries of tunes in ABC format. All you need is an ABC player, and there are links to several of those there also. I like ABCmus myself, although it cannot print out or display normal music notation. To do that, you have to use ABCmus to convert the ABC file into a MIDI, and then use one of many MIDI programs to do what you will with it.
Hope that helps.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Jon W.
Date: 19 Jan 98 - 02:09 PM

ABC2Win is another program that does a good job of displaying and printing ABC music files in regular notation. It does only a so-so job of playing the files, though - they play through the PC speaker (beeper) instead of the soundcard.

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Moonlitday
Date: 19 Jan 98 - 05:33 PM

ABC2WIN is a good easy to use program. Although sometimes it does have a habit of writing out some of the notation wrong. Also if you are writing the notation out you have to be careful....dotted eigth with a sixteenth figures are hard to get written properly. I'm still not exactly sure how to do it. Try the shareware first...even though you can't print with it, it gives you something to play with and compare to.

Chrissy

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: alison
Date: 21 Jan 98 - 10:01 PM

Hi Dulci-folk,

Try a search for "Richard's tune book", you'll find lots of tunes from many different countries including the ones you mentioned. Can't find the address at the moment, no doubt someone will help me out.

Slainte

ALison

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Joe Offer
Date: 22 Jan 98 - 01:04 AM

OK, here's a link to Richard Robinson's Tunebook. With an ABC player, you can go there and be in Celtic heaven. Richard's tunes used to be just on GIFs or some other format that was daunting to those of us who don't play an instrument. He converted all his songs to ABC, and they're great. He has links posted to ABC players you can download, or you can use the link above and go to the ABC home page.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: alison
Date: 22 Jan 98 - 06:18 PM

Thanks Joe

Slainte

Alison

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Bruce O.
Date: 22 Jan 98 - 07:54 PM

Chrissy,
If default is 1/8 notes, dotted 1/8 followed by 1/16 is the little arrowhead (at the bottom of the keyboad) pointing to the right between the two (originally) 1/8 notes. Reverse for 1/16 followed by 1/8. This save a lit of time compared to x3/2y/2.

But! Be carefull, if you post to a site using html, all between any arrowhead pointing left to the next one pointing right will disappear in the display! The ABC hompage has an ASCII file on the rules for encoding in ABC, that tells you how to do such things. It's free too.

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Joe Offer
Date: 22 Jan 98 - 08:42 PM

Say, Bruce, I have to admit that Alan's program made me lazy and I haven't learned ABC. If I were to take a couple hours to learn ABC, do you think I could enter songs more efficiently in ABC than I can by placing notes on a staff in Noteworthy Composer? The ABC songs you post make nice, neat little packages; and they sure pack a lot of music in a very little space.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Bruce O.
Date: 22 Jan 98 - 09:14 PM

It doesn't take two hours to learn ABC. Well, I used to do ASCII files to be used with the PLAY command in Quickbasic, which is pretty similar, but somewhat simpler.

ABC, (the play part) is, I think, a compiled Visual Basic program that makes the sounds using Basic's SOUND command. [You need VBRUN300.DLL to run it, but that's free from internet sites. Just unzip it and put it where ABC2WIN can find it.]

MY guess: A preliminary part interprets the ASCII characters and and converts them all to a time duration and frequency for each sucessive note. I fiddled a little with my own program for doing this with Quickbasic, but found that Quickbasic couldn't handle all my subroutines to do all the conversions from ASCII to numerical values for time and frequecy. Without subroutines it would take forever to do the checking to figure out how many characters in the string are for those relative to one note, and then convert these to a time duration and frequency.

I didn't want to foot the bill for Visual Basic, so just got ABC2WIN, which is downloadable for free, for play and display, but you pay a little to unlock the print option. I don't like the way ABC plays trills or grace notes, and sometimes I leave those out when I play tunes. Display is poor for . (staccato) above notes, and ties are sometimes awkwardly placed. Also ties are usually between grace notes and the next note in old music, and ABC doesn't display these ties. Otherwise it's fairly fast and easy. There are other ABC programs' but I haven't tried them. The ABC2WIN is from the originator of the ABC system.

I've read of another system under development, apparently for fully professional printing, and probably playing and displaying. If I remember correctly it is being distributed to a limited number of users now for evaluation.

Subject: RE: Technical help
From: Jon W.
Date: 23 Jan 98 - 10:18 AM

Joe, my $.02 is this: I used to enter note by note into Noteworthy, and after I tried ABC2Win, it's so much easier I've given up on everything else. Maybe it's just that it's fewer keystrokes (usually) to get the notes out. ABC2Win also has a pop-up help screen that has most of the information you need to enter ABC tunes instantly available.

Jon W.