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19 May 00 - 10:45 PM (#230848) Subject: Music publishing software suggestions From: Homeless A friend of mine is in a band whose members are scattered across the country. They all write songs that they need to convey to each of the others. They'd like to find some software that will not only allow them to input the tunes via keyboard and mouse onto sheet music, but also play said tunes (for those who can't read music). The basic requirements they are looking for are:
For Windows (tho if it also comes in Mac would be a plus) Can anyone recommend anything, or point me to where I might find something? |
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19 May 00 - 11:05 PM (#230850) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: MMario Check out NoteWorthy. |
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19 May 00 - 11:06 PM (#230851) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: katlaughing RealProducer is great for recording and Midi Notation Software is great for imputting a midi and two seconds later having printed music spit out...if you put either one in the SuperSearch or Filter boxes and set the age to at least one year, you'll find some threads about them which is where I learned about them and downloaded free versions which have been great. In the meantime, I'll go get some links to the download sites etc. and come back to post them for you. |
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19 May 00 - 11:08 PM (#230855) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: katlaughing Here's the link for RealProducer. I'll be back with teh other and Noteworthy Composer is good too, as MMario suggests, but RealProdcuer lets you reduce the size of teh file for faster and easier sending. |
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19 May 00 - 11:24 PM (#230865) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: katlaughing Here's the one for Midi Notation Software. BTW, the first link was courtesy of Joe Offer from an old thread. And here is one for Noteworthy Composer. Just to give credit...I learned about all of these from udder Mudders and it gives me great pleasure to be able to pass the info on. Good luck and have fun! kat |
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20 May 00 - 12:06 AM (#230887) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: IvanB Noteworthy Composer, which has already been mentioned twice is a good one and not too expensive. They might also check out the ABC home page. ABC is an ASCII based music notation system, which has much freeware written for it, both for Windows and Macs. Although it has a bit of a learning curve, once learned, it's fast and easy to notate a tune and it's platform independent. It's found here: |
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20 May 00 - 08:46 AM (#230967) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: John in Brisbane Hi Homeless - I am a committed fan of NoteWorthy Composer (at $40 odd it's hard to beat) but I just written a review of NUSE in the Mudcat FAQ Thread.
If you want to trade vocal harmonies (including lyrics) I personally wouldn't touch the ABC suite of programs. Great though they are, the current ABC standard which they rely upon fails abysmally when it comes to lyrics. While the MIDI standard isn't much better, the proprietary file types used by NoteWorthy and Muse do a fairly good job of associating notes and lyrics. For that reason each member of the group would need to have the same type of software.
If matching the tune and lyrics is no big deal then the choices are much wider. F'rinstance if all of the notation is being done by a couple of people they could use a prog like NoteWorthy and the rest of the group could just use a freebie like Midi Notate - just bear in mind that you can't modify or create new Midi files with this prog.
There's a number of experienced people here if you can't follow my ramblings. Regards, John
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20 May 00 - 01:39 PM (#231058) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: Mark Clark I have used Coda's Finale for many years and like it very much. It provides several modes of mouse and QWERTY keyboard input as well as MIDI input. I think it's also the most powerful of the publishing programs. It handles chords, lyrics, layers, instruments, staves, modes, scales, plainsong, etc. You can score anything from a lead sheet to a symphony. I'm not sure what the current price is but I think they have both a low end and a professional version now. You can get more information from their Web site. FWIW, I bought my first copy, along with MIDI card, at a large music store. Computer and software stores never know anything about music or MIDI. - Mark |
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20 May 00 - 02:55 PM (#231075) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: Jon Freeman I am a Cakewalk fan but I am far more interested in the sequencing aspects of MIDI than the notation aspects. For what you apear to require, Noteworthy will do a better job than Cakewalk for a lot less money. I can not comment on the higher end notation software like Finale and don't know what benefits they offer but my advice would be to download Noteworthy (it is shareware) and see if it meets your requirements. Jon |
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20 May 00 - 10:44 PM (#231240) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: IvanB I agree with John of Brisbane that the ABC programs aren't too hot at matching up lyrics to staff notation. My suggestion to look at the ABC site was mainly for the 'shorthand' the system provides for entering music. I find I can usually enter a tune in ABC much faster than I can produce it in NoteWorthy. After entering as an ABC file, I then run it through one of the ABC to MIDI converters to produce a file I can import into NoteWorthy (I use Henrik Norbeck's ABCMus - registration a lordly $10 US the last I checked). Then I either import the lyrics from a text file or enter them directly into NoteWorthy. Most ABC programs are supporting at least 4 voices now. But my main reason for mentioning ABC was its cross-platform capabilities, since availability for MAC was also mentioned in the request. Since I don't have access to a MAC, I can't remark on its capabilities, but Phil Taylor's BarFly seems to be a well received MAC program on the ABCUsers' List. |
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20 May 00 - 10:55 PM (#231246) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: Jon Freeman I'd missed the mention of the word Mac in the original post. Melody Assistant has been mentioned in past threads, is capable of producing both MIDI and ABCs and is available for both PC and Mac platforms at $15 shareware. I know John in Brisbane has mentioned it in a past thread but I don't think he has used it and I have only messed with it a couple of times. Can anybody provide any info/ reccommendations for this product? Jon |
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21 May 00 - 07:39 PM (#231577) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: John in Brisbane Jon, I was prompted by your thread to give Melody Assistant another try out last night. I had previously downloaded v 5.1.0 but could not get it to install properly (that's a fairly rare occurrence these days). I went back to the home page and tried again with a brand new v 5.1.1. It downloaded and installed fine. By the time I went to bed I'd been struggling with it for about 3 hours and I had to reboot 8 or 9 times after it had kicked me out.
The advertised features of this program are very impressive and it's a bargain basement price, BUT I am somewhat concerned that it has some basic stability problems. If it lived up to its promises it could be a very useful application for folkies, but I must admit I'm very unconvinced at this stage.
Regards, John |
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22 May 00 - 06:03 PM (#232128) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: Jon Freeman John, I have quite a few computer things to do over the next couple of days (want to try to make mine dual boot, run Linux, fit another hard disk....) but when I'm done, I will download the latest version of Melody Assistant and see if I run into the same sort of problems as you did. I agree that Melody Assistant sound good but if it really does suffer from that sort of stability problem, IMO it is worse than useless. Jon |
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22 May 00 - 06:47 PM (#232147) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: John in Brisbane That would be great Jon, I'm not so keen on lambasting a product that has such obvious potential, but I rarely encounter these sorts of problems these days. If you have better luck I'll then gladly look at my own configuration.
As an aside I left my 13 year old to play around with NoteWorthy composer when I went to rehearsal last night. By the time I got home 3 hours later he was in bed having composed a 24 bar piece, notated and printed it for a school project. He hadn't used it before - I guess that means that the average adult could pick it up in a week or two.
Regards, John |
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22 May 00 - 07:19 PM (#232170) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: Jon Freeman Don't you hate these kids ;-) Jon |
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22 May 00 - 09:36 PM (#232261) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: IvanB When I was looking for an inexpensive music notation package a couple years ago, I downloaded trial versions of NoteWorthy Composer, Melody Assistant and Muse, along with a few others whose names escape me. Since the version of MA I tried was 1.2, I thought I'd best have another look before commenting on it. So I downloaded the latest trial version last night. It installed and runs without problems. The appearance is certainly improved over the older version, but I still find it an unituitive program. I couldn't find a way to make it print more than 3 measures to a line without physically narrowing every bar in a piece with my mouse. I also dislike the fact that music entry is entirely with the mouse - you click on a note of the correct duration on a toolbar, then click at the location on the staff where you want to place it. Same for ornaments, clefs, time signatures, etc. It seems that many tasks which are accomplished by global settings in other programs require fine tuning of each occurrence in MA. Although the price is certainly inexpensive, I still think NoteWorthy composer is a better value at almost three times the price. I certainly haven't delved into all the possibilities of NoteWorthy, but I've printed music which rivaled the appearance of many of the professionally printed songbooks I have. BTW, John, your review of Muse seems to have disappeared from the FAQ, but I believe you mentioned something about not being able to print out anything with the trial version. As I remember, the downloaded file comes with several features turned off so you can "play" with the program all you want, then when you're ready you can turn on a 30 day trial period which enables the missing functions, but times out in 30 days. I was able to print by doing this, but I still found NoteWorthy's output the best of the lot. |
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23 May 00 - 08:14 PM (#232783) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: John in Brisbane Ivan, thanks for the concise summation - it appears pretty spot on to me. I'll repost the MUSE review when I get the chance to tidy up some of the HTML. You'll see that I give it quite a good rap. I must have a little play and see if it's possible to change the music font - the quality of the Clef and Key Signature engraving certainly needs a lift. I'll be in touch. Regards, John |
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12 Jun 02 - 03:50 AM (#728144) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: John in Brisbane After a long absence from this subject, are there any experienced and/or committed users of Melody Assistant out there please. Some of the newer features in the ABC Draft Standard are very promising for lyrics use. Please send me a quick email and I'll send you a trial .abc file or two to try out. For general PC use the situation with ABC software for lyrics notation hasn't improved that much - yet! Some arcane stuff is now available and I hope that this will improve in its friendliness over time. Regards, John johninbrisbane@lycos.com |
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12 Jun 02 - 04:37 AM (#728149) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: JohnInKansas One of the recent (1 year ago) threads that discussed this subject fairly thouroughly is at Music Annotation Software Question. The real problem is that there are so many programs around that will do (mostly) what you want - with everyone having a favorite - that it's really hard to shake out a choice and get started. Without doubt, the premier programs are Finale and Sibelius. I'd give the vote to Sibelius, because it seems to do a better job on tab - but both of these are $600+ programs unless you can get the "student discount." The little brothers and sisters of these programs will do what you asked for now, and there are more shareware/freeware programs than even mudcat can possibly try. Many shareware programs are limited to a single melody line. Unfortunately that's true of the Mid2Txt setup, which would otherwise be the ideal solution to "email" music. If you want to send music - any method other than snail mail - MIDIs are small enough to go as email attachments, and ANY decent notation program will make a MIDI from your notation, and will "make" notation from a MIDI. It's not even really necessary for everybody to use the same notation program. ANY other transmission of a notation program file requires that the person you send a file to must have the same notation program in order to read it - or must at least be able to "import" the file into their "family" version. John |
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12 Jun 02 - 04:56 AM (#728153) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: DMcG I use Harmony Assistant, which is the 'big brother' of Melody Assistant. The current version of Harmony is 8.0.5 and seems to be very stable. I have found that the stability varies a lot version to version: the last version of the 7 series was much less stable than the preceding one. One of the most off putting things about the first version of the software I used is that it opened every available toolbar at once and there are about 30 of the things. The first task is to close them all down without looking at them too much and then only open the ones you need. There are about 4 I normally have open (notes, rests and play are the main ones). I haven't used Noteworthy much - I did an evaluation exercise a few years back before settling on Melody (and later upgrading to Harmony). The big plus for Melody is that it handled ABC, which at the time NoteWorthy didn't -does it now? Coupled with ABCMUS, I can easily read anything out of the DT and begin manipulating it, which (at the time) I couldn't do effectively with Noteworthy, since the only option was to go via a MIDI which lost even an attempt at the lyrics. |
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12 Jun 02 - 04:59 AM (#728156) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: DMcG I forgot to respond to JohnInKansas's point: Melody Assistant, and most of the other notation programs these days, come with a completely free and unrestricted viewer/player for the music, so you only need one 'author' and the rest of the band can be 'viewers'. Of course, it may suit you to have more people able to alter the music. |
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12 Jun 02 - 08:24 AM (#728221) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: MMario Just a few notes regarding NoteWorthy Composer - they have a web-browser plugin and also a "reader" program available free - there is a third party program available that will convert back and forth from Noteworthy to abc - called abc2nwc |
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12 Jun 02 - 08:28 AM (#728225) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: JohnInKansas The PermaThread Index shows: Macs, Music and MIDI which might be of interest for your Mac requirements. The thread starts of with a whole gob of clickies to sources for Mac music program stuff. The PermaThread Index also shows the thread I posted above: Help: Music Annotation Software Question I use Noteworthy because it's the "program of choice" for the guys who put tunes in the DigiTrad. It is not what I would consider an appropriate program for "publishing" music, but does a reasonable job if all you want is printed copies to use withing your group. Everyone should have it - 'cause we've still got a whole bunch of tunes needed for the DigiTrad. Everybody needs some program that will make midis - and the free (to 'catters) Mid2Txt/Txt2Mid set, because that's the easy way to post a tune to a thread, or to email a quicky to a friend. The link that the program prints no longer works, but you can get these at MIDIText. When you convert a midi with the Mid2Txt program, you also get an ABC. The Txt2Mid will convert the miditext part back to a midi that virtually any computer, PC or Mac, should be able to play. If you want to convert the ABC back to something, you'll need ABC software - see the threads linked above. Miditext and ABC are both designed specifically to allow you to "send" music as plain text. This is something you would normally need to do only for web postings, although if you're clever you can probably find other uses for it. ANY decent notation program should accept input from your computer keyboard and your mouse - whichever you choose. Most of them also will allow you to plug a synth keyboard (if it has a midi output) in and "play" the music in, if you want. ANY decent notation program should be able to print at least 8 staves, and should be able to "save as midi." The things that separate the better programs from the lesser ones are things like: Cheaper/Freeware programs often limit you to 16th notes for the shortest "playable." Midrange (over $25 in commercial stuff) should give you 64th notes. Most low end stuff will "play" repeats (dotted bars) but may not do DC/DS and such. Most low end programs will not automatically play turns, trills, and such - you have to "note them in." Linking lyrics is somewhat variable, even with the better low end programs, but a decent program should let you put at least 8 verses - linked - in the score. Any program will require some "learning curve." If you learn any of these programs well enough, you can make it do quite a bit. The idea is to find one that does what you want it to as easily as possible. John |
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12 Jun 02 - 09:52 AM (#728263) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: John in Brisbane In fact if anybody has a commercial program which can import .abc files I'd appreciate hearing from them so you can try out .abc files with embedded lyrics. This includes Macs, Linux whatever. I'm very keen to hear from a Mac BarFly user please, because its reputation is very good in other regards. The only commercial prog which I've used a lot (and has only had one version in the last 5 years) is ABCMUS 1.1 - there's a new one due soon-ish. ABC2NWC is a potentially very good prog for converting ABC notation to NoteWorthy Composer (incl lyrics), but it has a little bug which often stops all the lyrics from being converted. The author is working om another major development, but if we can isolate the factors that cause the problem he may be prepared to fix it. My bet is that it stumbles when it strikes a particular kind of notation which his parser rejects. No programming required, just a keen eye for pattern recognition in the ABC lyrics. Regards, John johninbrisbane@lycos.com |
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12 Jun 02 - 11:46 AM (#728350) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: Mark Clark The subject of music representation formats and publishing programs is moving very quickly and needs to be followed fairly closely to keep up. A starting point might be an older thread called “Music + Computer Geeks... Listen Up.” All digital representations of music are being subsumed as the world-wide adoption of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) begins to provide a universal interchange format for music. There are several proposed standards using XML in various stages of development and adoption. Perhaps the most widely adopted at this point is the MusicXML standard. Several software companies have already incorporated MusicXML interchange functionality into their products as referenced in this diagram. One of the programs that includes MusicXML interchange as well as ABC is the TaBazar program designed especially for guitar and string players. (Here is an example of TaBazar output.) For those comfortable (and experienced) with computing, there is also the GNU LilyPond project. LilyPond provides a manageable input notation for MusicTeX and is capable of typesetting both complex scores and simple melodies with lyrics. As a GNU (GUN's Not Unix) project, LilyPond is free but, used with Windows, requires Cygwin—free from RedHat— to provide the UNIX environment and the TeX/LaTeX implementation. This is definately not for the technophobe nor the neo-Luddite. I have licensed the Finale product for many years now and wouldn't really recommend it for most users of this forum. As noted above it's very expensive and on top of that they want to sell you a $200 USD upgrade every year or more. It's a great program but is very difficult to learn and has capabilities most of us will never need. Still, with the advent of MusicXML as a standard interchange format, we can use low cost or free software and still exchange music files with users of the high-end programs. The thing to watch for when choosing music software is support for an XML exchange standard like MusicXML. - Mark
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13 Jun 02 - 10:05 AM (#729134) Subject: RE: Help: Music publishing software suggestions From: pavane My shareware program reads abc, imports lyrics from text files to add to the tune, can print up to 6 staves together out of a total of 16, uses 32nd notes and grace notes, and can write to MIDI and abc. (It can also write Songwright files.) Scoring is not its main aim, but the output MIDI files could be input to a specialist program. So why isn't anyone using it? Registration encourages further development. I am currently planning an entirely new facility, 'note profiles' which will allow most MIDI effects to be applied to any single note, and edited graphically. This could be used, for example, to pan one note from left to right, ramp up the volume, and so on. This would provide the flexibility associated with sequencers in a more user-friendly way (I hope!).
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