Variable split point input
Dear Musescorists,
Why is it that over 20 years ago CLab 'Notator' could have a variable split point created by drawing a line with the mouse between the treble and bass clef, which has got to be the best, easiest and most intuitive way of doing it - and this in a sequencer/notation program that was less than 3Mb - and ever since then every program I've seen or heard about makes creating a variable split point such an enormous amount of effort???
So, I'll keep using my 20-odd year old Atari and Notator program until one or the other finally gives up the ghost.
It seems unbelievable that more than 20 years has elapsed, and still no-one has produced something better if you're just interested in producing professional-looking scores easily!!!
Alan Rogers
Comments
I'm not sure what this feature does. Is it the ability to split a system at a specified bar line?
He,s referring to MIDI files that wee created from a live keyboard performance where all notes are on channel and thus the proram can't separate out which hand played which notes. Notator awould make a crude guess as to which notes to put on one staff, but then you could "draw" a line with the mouse to tell it which notes belonged to which staves. It was indeed a cool feature, and given that Notator was a sequencer first and foremost and a notation proram only secondarily, it made sense to focus on features to make it easier to input via MIDI - that was really the only efficient way of entering notes at all. Of course, it still was not as efficient as entering notation the usual way in MuseScore or other modern programs, but if you needed to enter music via MIDI, Notator beats anything else that has come along since. It had some other features that were way ahead of its time as well, like linked parts.
But for what it's worth, MuseScorw is the *far* superior progam for actually producing notation in almost every conceivable way other than those having to do with importing MIDI. So I'd definitely recommend considering that perhaps there are other things more important than being able to take a MIDI file and split up the staves, and it might be worth looking at MuseScore despite not measurng up in that one small area.
"One small area"??
I'd hardly say that a musician wanting to play something in via midi from a midi keyboard is "One small area". By far the easiest way to notate a piano score is to play it in, correct the wrong notes or add/subtract notes from the result and adjust the timing where necessary, all of which is a piece of cake in Notator, which imports it as a treble and base clef piano score (if you tell it to). Initially the score has a set split point, for example, middle C.
You then tell it that it's polyphonic and all the notes go into the treble clef, after which you can draw a line using the mouse between the notes you want in the right hand, which stay where they are, and the left hand, the notes for which drop down to the bass clef.
Enabling this "Small area" would make loads of pianists/composers/arrangers all over the world very happy indeed, and save them innumerable hours of boring entering full scores all by hand.
So there. Hands up all the musicians in the world that would like to be able to do this. Did you feel the gale-force wind after they read that??
Alan Rogers
In reply to variable split point by Alan Rogers
There is one problem with that, and which has affected all notation programs I have ever used.....
Quantisation!
MIDI is primarily a performance medium.
It is designed for musical instruments to exchange performance data.
The problem is that performance data does not translate well into music notation.
I am one of the few (lucky) people I know that can play a part into a notation program via MIDI and not spend hours afterwards cleaning up the result, and even then I can only do it one voice at a time, and for no longer than 8 bars.
This is why music software split into the two main groups of sequencers and notators.
In the early days programs such as Notator, Logic etc were able to cover both bases because musicians were so glad that there was something around to take the ball-ache out of composition that they were happy to ignore the primitive printed output generated by them.
I still have a couple of scores I produced on the then revolutionary Rhapsody software on Acorn computers in the 1990's. The output from that is again primitive compared with what is expected today.
Then along came Sibelius and expectations of what notation software could do changed forever.
Both Sibelius and Finale - the two main stream commercial notation programs do have real-time MIDI input capabilites, and whilst there has been some improvement, in order to produce acceptable notation this way, you have to concentrate on playing strictly in time, which is something humans are very bad at.
Our entire musical training is geared towards injecting subtle nuances into our performances which music notation just cannot record.
So sadly, what you are asking is impossible at the moment.
Maybe in the future some genius programmer while come up with an algorithm which will enable us to do what you are asking.
But until then, I'm afraid you will have to limit yourself to step time MIDI entry in notation programs.
In reply to variable split point by Alan Rogers
It's a larger area of concern in Notator, because, as I said, MIDI is really the best way of entering music into that program, so it's hard to imagine that there might be other methods that work better. But MuseScore, like Finale and Sibelius, has direct note entry methods that in the end turn out to be more efficient and powerful. It might seem *natural* to play a piano piece then fix things later, but if you really want to get professional-looking results, the amount of work required in terms of correcting rhythms, enharmonic spellings, voice assignment and so forth - even if you play everything perfectly - often ends up being more than simply entering the piece directly in the first place would have been. And of course, the facility you describe is only relevant to piano (pr other keyboard instrument) music - when entering any other kind of music, that facility is irrelevant.
Notator, being a sequencer first, is definitely the least inefficient program I've ever seen when it comes to MIDI entry, and the ways it deals with quantization is more sophisticated than any other notation program in terms of being able to give you a reasonable facsimile of the rhythms you want right out of the box. But it's still the case that for most purposes, direct keyboard entry in MuseScore is better than MIDI entry in Notator. I know it takes a while to get used to other ways of working, but having made the same switch from Notator and MIDI entry to a more direct entry method some years ago, I can confirm that once you make the adjustment, it's almost always preferable, and while there were certain occasions when I've missed some particular feature from Notator, overall, there is absolutely no question that I get better results with less effort now.
And in any case once the music is entered, the things you do in terms of formatting and so forth - like I said, Notator was way ahead of its time for sure, but it's still somewhat primitive by modern standards in a lot of other ways. Bottom line, If the goal is to produce professional results easily, there is absolutely no question that MuseScore gets you there faster, because everything else in the process is so much better, and once you adjust to a different method of note entry, even the note entry is at least as good.