Dots On Lines

[Galley Wench]

Hi there

 

Does anyone know of any software that enables the writing of music i.e. dots on lines etc. I have composed (sounds good eh - but Ive only done simple melodies) a number of tunes to songs written by my hubby and we want to be able to put them to print. Personally I know very little about reading music and still have to write the letter beneath the dots but these songs have been written for a Folk Musical (also written by hubby) based on a folk tale from Rydale (North Yorkshire) called Sarkless Kitty and if we want to put this play on we will need some proper written music for 'real' musicians to follow.

[Johan]

Does anyone know of any software that enables the writing of music i.e. dots on lines etc.

 

Hi,

 

ABC navigator might be usefull

 

ABC Navigator

 

It's freeware. If you know the names of the notes you can write en print music, using the ABC standard.

 

Let me know if you need more help on that.

 

Johan

[CaryK]

I use a program called Harmony Assistant. You can get to their website using the link below.

 

www.myriad-online.com/en/products/harmony.htm

[Laitch]

Hey Carol

 

I learned ABC notation so I could understand and generate sheet music of tunes I wanted to share with people who rely mostly on dots to pick up tunes at first. ABC is very useful for jotting down tunes without having staff paper. Once the ABC format is understood, you drop the ABCs you make of a tune on the Convert-a-matic on this site and you get sheet music and midi files.

 

If I learned ABC notation, anybody can.

Here's the site I used for learning:

http://www.lesession.co.uk/abc/abc_notation.htm

[MichaelB]

I use Noteworthy Composer .. but I'll have a look at Harmony Assistant to see which I prefer

 

http://www.noteworthysoftware.com/

[Charlotte]

If You are looking for freeware, then Finale Notepad is an option: http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/

[Theodore Kloba]

I use Noteworthy Composer

So do I. It's easy and inexpensive. I partiicularly like the keyboard shortcuts.

If You are looking for freeware, then Finale Notepad is an option

I tried it but couldn't quite get it to do what I wanted quickly.

 

I've tinkered a bit with lilypond, but it's meant for engraver-quality score generation, not for quick notation as the above two are.

[Richard Morse]

I also use Noteworthy Composer (have now for over a decade) and find it to be incredibly fast and easy to use, flexible, powerful - and - a great deal for only 40 bucks. One of the features I like most about it is the ability to computer-keyboard input quickly and that I can alter any note to sound just about any way I want it to (trill, slur, attack, etc.) including setting a piece to "swing" (with any stresses I want) without changing the notation.

 

Of course you may not need/want anything beyond setting the notes down, but it does all that just fine.

 

There a few things that I've found that sets it apart from other similar programs - both good and bad.

 

On the good side, you can easily make chords, including chords that have one note (or notes) that is/are of a different length of time than the others. Another nice thing is that you can alter the time signature and tempo as many times during a piece AS WELL AS alter the number of notes/beats in any measure - IOW, intentionally make the tune "crooked" which is essential to many tunes. I've found that other notation software will not allow measures to be so manipulated. Also Noteworthy has a very active users forum which has been very helpful to me.

 

On the bad side, the edit mode is one long staff line which means that you have to continually scroll left/right across the screen when comparing parts or cut/pasting. Other programs let you work in a "page score" rather than "line score" mode which I think is considerably more useful. And a small peeve is that it would be nice to have what is being edited PLAYED as it's being edited in instead of going into a separate "play" mode. Other programs do this and I hear that the upcoming version of Noteworthy will do so to.

 

I've tried several other programs but have stayed with Noteworthy over the years. I've not heard about Harmony Assistant before and it sounds very appealing, and not much more expensive at $70.

[Galley Wench]

WOW! Thanks for all the suggestions. This should keep me busy for a while. Really appreciate the help

[Johan]

I've tried several other programs but have stayed with Noteworthy over the years. I've not heard about Harmony Assistant before and it sounds very appealing, and not much more expensive at $70.

 

Another useful feature of Harmony is the plugin for your internetbrowser. With the help of this plugin you can easily share music on the web. With the possibility to listen, transpose, print, etc the tune within your internetbrowser.

 

Take a look yourself, I use abc files as input (even occasionally send from my cellphone), modify it a little in Harmony and pouff!!! on the web.

 

If you use this link Our tunebook and there click on the icon of the operatingsystem of your computer (don't mind the dutch blabla), the appropriate plugin will be installed. You'll then have acces to our repertiore of mainly traditional dutch folk tunes. Showing the tunes clearly readable on the screen and delivering perfect printouts.

 

Johan

[spindizzy]

I also use Noteworthy Composer ....

....

And a small peeve is that it would be nice to have what is being edited PLAYED as it's being edited in instead of going into a separate "play" mode. Other programs do this and I hear that the upcoming version of Noteworthy will do so to.

 

If you're a registered Noteworthy user, you can download the new version for trying out ... it seems to have stabilised now, and I would guess they'll release it soon. I can't remember if you can play as you enter (I think so) .... I don't think it does page mode editing though (I'll check this evening) - yes it would be useful - maybe we can throw that suggestion at them before they finalise the latest version!

 

There's also a plugin for browsers to let you play nwc files, so they can be distributed, and a shareware ABC2NWC converer.

 

Chris J

Edited April 12, 2006 by spindizzy

[Cream-T]

Another plug for the ABC format here. It's easy to learn and quick to do. I tend to use it "the geeky way", editing text files on the Linux console, then converting them to MIDI, PostScript or PDF with a simple command.

 

The ABC frontend programs for Windows and Linux are easy to use, though - and best of all, the whole thing is free!

 

Another great advantage os that ABC files are very small text files, which are easy to share. The excellent folk music databases at http://tunedb.org and http://www.thesession.org/ make very good use of ABC.

[Nanette Hooker]

I also use Noteworthy Composer (have now for over a decade) and find it to be incredibly fast and easy to use, flexible, powerful - and - a great deal for only 40 bucks.

 

Also Noteworthy has a very active users forum which has been very helpful to me.

 

 

I also use Noteworthy Composer and also find it easy to use and flexible, but it does have some features that I find annoying.

 

Richard - I would be interested to know about the forum. Is it web-based? If so, what is the web address?

[Richard Morse]

I would be interested to know about the forum. Is it web-based? If so, what is the web address?

Web-based. You can get to it by going to Noteworthy's main page and dropdown menu down at the upper right to "My Noteworth Community" or directly by using this link here.

 

I also checked out the features of the upcoming release which says that it will do sounding notes as they are added, contoured slurs, and improved accidental placement within chords (three things I LIKE!) amongst a host of other things.

[RatFace]

I had a play with Lilypond last night - completely free, cross-platform, and a bit different. I like it a lot - it has a fairly steep learning curve but the output is nice (basically it didn't require any manual tweaking to make it look beautiful) and once you get the hang of it it's very fast to enter music - I suspect when you get the hang of it faster than any point-and-click system (even using shortcuts) since it's all done through typing. It's like abc but much more flexible (I was using it to enter guitar music). It will also output midi, as well as pdf (and ps).

 

Anyone that uses abc might want to have a look, especially if they find the abc constraints annoying.

[lildogturpy]

Another great advantage os that ABC files are very small text files, which are easy to share. The excellent folk music databases at http://tunedb.org and http://www.thesession.org/ make very good use of ABC.

 

<gripe>

I would have to take issue with the statement that thesession.org "makes very good use of ABC". This may not be the place but I have always had an objection to the restricted use of ABC at thesession.org For some strange reason you can not just enter a time signature, you have to choose a type of tune from the list and if the one you want is not there, too bad. Many fields are disallowed, such as adding composer, source, discography data so much of the useful information about a tune is missing and you have to read the comments section of the web page to look for additional information. The tune also seems to be stored containing html code. This is fine to read the tune on thesession.org but when you find a match using JC's ABC Tunefinder it is often truncated with a < br > code and you only get the first line.

 

For other reasons I won't go into it is not possible to change a tune once it has been added to their database. Many users there advocate copy and pasting the abc code into the concertina.net convert-o-matic so kudos to Paul for another great service

</gripe>

[stuart estell]

I'd echo the support for Noteworthy, even though when I'm using the computer to produce notation I use Sibelius from choice. Sibelius is effectively just Noteworthy on (lots of) steroids.

 

More and more though, I find myself being exceptionally lazy and just scanning in whatever I've written down on manuscript paper, and tweaking it a little in Photoshop, so that the others in my group get, effectively, handwritten copies of arrangements by email!

Edited April 13, 2006 by stuart estell

[Nanette Hooker]

I would be interested to know about the forum. Is it web-based? If so, what is the web address?

Web-based. You can get to it by going to Noteworthy's main page and dropdown menu down at the upper right to "My Noteworth Community" or directly by using this link here.

 

 

Thanks muchly for that info