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Help: Music Write 386
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Subject: Music Write 386 From: GUEST,Walking Eagle Date: 29 Sep 02 - 09:13 PM Help! I'm looking for some web based down load shareware music writing stuff for my wheezer/geezer IBM 386. Something with the music symbols and notes. Thanks! W.E. |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: Amos Date: 29 Sep 02 - 09:21 PM WE; Could I persuade you to buy an IMac? I suspect your life would be improved! Regards, A |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: GUEST,Walking Eagle Date: 29 Sep 02 - 09:38 PM Thanks Amos, but the operative word here is FREE. W.E. |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: GUEST,bardford Date: 30 Sep 02 - 12:39 AM Are you familiar with ABC notation? There is software out there that transposes ABC files to sheet music. (ABC2Win comes to mind)Click here I haven't used this software (I'm a Mac guy,too), but ABC is a useful tool, and might fill a need. Also, check out Melody Assistant. They might have a version that fits. |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: JohnInKansas Date: 30 Sep 02 - 05:11 AM There was music software that ran (sort of) on 386 machines, but it will probably be pretty tough finding any of it today. Many eons ago I had a primitive music program that ran on Windows 1.4 (sort of - but then Win 1.4 only simulated running most of the time). All of the oldest (386ish era) programs that I ever had were on 5.25 inch floppies, and the last time I "hot-wired" a 5.25 drive into a machine to look at some, the disks themselves had lost too many bits to get anything off of them. Even if you found someone who had a set of old program disks "in the attic behind Uncle Henry's moosehead" they would probably not be usable. Programs available "back then" were so primitive that I resorted to using CAD (Generic CAD, $39 in 1980) to "draw" scores that looked better than I could get out of the "music" programs. (Of course - all we had then was dot printers, too.) I've also used Word 6 to map out a measure or two (using field codes) for printing - but I'm not that much of a masochist any more. I certainly don't mean to say that there's nothing "out there," and I'll keep my eyes open for anything that pops up; but I'm afraid I don't often go places where I'd expect to run into what you're looking for. John |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: Dave Bryant Date: 30 Sep 02 - 05:25 AM What operating system are you running - Windows 3x or just DOS. For Win3x I'd suggest Personal Composer and for DOS I'd suggest SONGWRIGHT - all the DT tunes are scored in it. |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: JohnInKansas Date: 30 Sep 02 - 06:26 AM Personal Composer $70 - $300 Is SongWright available? Google finds a 1975 review (no source) as the latest related info. John |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: GUEST,Walking Eagle Date: 30 Sep 02 - 05:45 PM Thanks for the help. I'm refreshing this thread to see if anyone else has any more ideas. |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: Dave Bryant Date: 01 Oct 02 - 04:55 AM Walking Eagle - if you sign up to Mudcat (it's free) then I could PM you with some suggestions. |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: Mark Clark Date: 01 Oct 02 - 12:17 PM W.E., As you've probably discovered, the problem these days is that, even though a program might be small and simple enough to run on an i386 machine under Windows 3.1, they're all built using the latest development tools and software libraries so they usually require a Pentium processor and Windows 95 at a minimum. Very few developers will take the trouble to maintain backwards compatibility for computer systems that are several generations old. What is your level of computing expertise? If you are willing to spend some time learning, and tinkering there is software available for your system that will produce very nice looking scores. Of course the appearance of any printed page depends to a great extent on the resolution of your printer. The systems I'm going to discuss aren't sequencers or music production tools, they just let you produce nice printed scores. The software is built on the TeX (pronounced tech) typesetting system placed in the public domain by its designer, Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus at Stanford. TeX revolutionized the typesetting industry and, when you aren't typesetting music, will also let you create beautifully typeset documents. Most of what you need can be downloaded from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). Be warned that most TeX systems aren't going to install themselves just by clicking. You'll have to decide how you want to set up your directory structures and you'll have to know how to set up environment variables on your system. There are many complete TeX distributions but, for your purposes, EMTeX is probably the best choice. The EMTeX distribution was built by Eberhard Mathes (I think that's right) especially for the i386 and Windows 3.1. I used it for many years without any trouble. You'll also want Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (pronounced la-tech) macros if they aren't included with EMTeX.
After TeX and LaTeX you'll need MusicTeX or it's successor, MusixTeX. MusixTeX includes everything needed to print beautiful scores but encoding the source files is daunting for most people. Chris Walshaw's original ABC notation system used MusicTeX for output so he didn't have to write programs to produce a score. His program called You could also use GNU LilyPond to provide a more friendly input syntax but LilyPond requires Cygwin (a UNIX/POSIX layer for Windows) on the Windows platform and I don't think the current release of Cygwin will run on an i386 system. I know all this must seem daunting but these systems are in relatively wide use around the world. There is lots of help available on CTAN and in USENET News groups. You must understand that the economics don't really support the use of all this if you're starting from scratch. If you are a computer professional or knowledgable hobiest you won't have any trouble but if computing holds any mystery for you at all, you'll be much better of hiring yourself out to shovel walks—a single major snow storm will take care of you—and use the money to buy a refurbished Pentium machine with Windows 95. The number of hours you have to spend before you're ready to print music will be a couple of orders of magnitude less if you go the snow shoveling route. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: GUEST,Jon Freeman Date: 01 Oct 02 - 03:11 PM OK, Mark Clark has taken you through the tech route. He loses me at times BTW but he always has lots of good advie and good info. I keep telling myself I'll learn more one day... Assuming you are running Win 3.1 are looking for shareware and want to keep it simple, my own advice would be to visit http://www.harmony-central.com/Software/Windows/sequencing.html and look for the 16 bit version of Noteworthy Composer 1.50 there. As far as I can make out from the "more info" link, it will run on your machine and it looks to me as if the download is still available. Jon |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: Mark Clark Date: 01 Oct 02 - 08:50 PM As so often happens, Jon is exactly right. If there is Windows 3.1 16 bit software still around somewhere, by all means use that. I think I still have the Win 3.1, 16 bit distribution of Finale I used to use. I've upgraded Finale many times over the years but I'll bet I still have the old floppies somewhere. There is also a Common Lisp (CLISP) program available called Common Music Notation (CMN) that I've downloaded but haven't tried yet. If you can find a free 16 bit Windows Common Lisp implementation it might be worth a shot. The output looks nice and it handles complex scores. The input looks very Lisp-like so it's probably fairly natural to write. I don't yet know if conversions exist between CMN notation and other formats such as ABC. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: GUEST,Jon Freeman Date: 02 Oct 02 - 06:18 AM On the subject of old music software, I have a floppy for Cakewalk 3.0 here and I still use the program which as far as I can make out would run on a 286. It is still my favourite MIDI editing tool (I prefer it to later versions I have tried) but at the moment I am more concerned with abc and I don't like MIDI to abc conversions so am using other software (currently Noteworthy). I have never used the high quality notation software such as Finale but for my purposes, if I want to try to make something to play, MIDI rules and Cakewalk is a "Rolls Royce" in that department as I believe Cubase is. For my purposes at folkinfo, abc rules the day. I have yet to find the "perfect" editing program but matters can only improve in time and there is active development both with abc and the etension, the abc plus project. It fits my needs well: Plain text format - few posting troubles (abc does use angle brackets to make entering dotted rythms such as hornpipes easier so in a similar way to the new Linebreak option here, I have an abc option wich effectively ingnores HTML), no hassle over loading and storing binary data in the db and there are several good console apps for conversions - I run: abc2midi, adcm2ps and Ghostscript to handle postscript output to make .png and .pdf files from .ps. I'm really hoping abc has a long and good future ahead of it and believe that for my type of Internet apps, it is the best choice by quite a margin. Jon |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: GUEST,Jon Freeman Date: 02 Oct 02 - 07:31 PM Drifting further off topic but just noting tht I have got round to reading the content of Mark's link above. It does look very interesting and quite capable... I don't know Lisp but it looks to me should be relatively easy to learn how to use this program and there seems to be suggestions of producing graphical user interface at some point in the future which will make it far more appealing. I intend to try to get it running on Linux at home sometime this week and look forward to seeing if I can use it. I have to make it clear that I am far from expert at music software but my own feelings do tell me this one is well worth investigating and perhaps following the development. Jon |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: Mark Clark Date: 03 Oct 02 - 09:17 AM I've managed to get CMN installed and working but haven't done much with it yet. I downloaded the Windows version of CLISP—actually I downloaded the Cygwin version too—and got it installed using the installation .bat file that comes with it. I just gunzipped it using WinZip and moved it into its own folder in C:\Program Files. One doesn't need to be a LISP programmer to use the system but you will have to go through the documentation to figure out how to get CMN loaded into LISP and save the LISP image so that only has to be done once. If that seems daunting, PM me and I'll send instructions. The “manual” for CMN is at Common Music Notation (CMN) Manual in case anyone would like to take a look and see whether it's something they might want to use. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: Music Write 386 From: John in Brisbane Date: 03 Oct 02 - 10:13 AM There's plenty of good advice above. Just a few extra points. A 386 will certainly run the Win 3.1 16 bit version of NoteWorthy Composer. The only issue here is that you'll need a soundcard - I expect that the early Soundblaster 16's should work fine, but can be a PITA to configure. If you can't locate the software let me know, but I don't anticipate you'll have any problems. The DOS version of the Digital Tradition database is still available (I think) at Mudcat and will run like a charm on the smell of an oily G string on a 386. You won't need a soundcard to play the single track tunes with bouncing ball above the lyrics, but no score printout is available. Through the courtesy of other Mudcatters I have a ccouple of versions of SongWright which I could provide - but quite frankly I don't really recommend it. The proprietary format is a dinosaur. Much better to use software based on MIDI or ABC standards. There's PLENTY of good quality free stuff out there for your treasured 386. Regards, John in Brisbane johninbrisbaneatlycos.com |
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