Bryan Creer wrote: >Phil Taylor wrote - > >>BarFly handles chords with notes of unequal >>length by padding out the shorter notes with rests when playing, >>so it's "longest note prevails". > >But Jack Campin (a BarFly user) had said - > >>but the semantics I'd need in every instance >>where I've wanted it would be that the *shortest* note counts. > >PT - > >>The chord gets drawn on a single >>stem though, so if you have an eighth and a sixteenth in the same >>chord the result looks like two sixteenths, as they're both drawn >>on a stem with two tails. > >Not what the writer asked for.
He's never asked me for it (neither has any other BarFly user). Under those circumstances I must presume that everybody is (reasonably) happy with what the program does at present. >>The way to deal with this, I suppose, is >>to draw two separate notes with tails in opposite directions, but >>then what do you do if there is more than two notes in the chord? > >That's what Abacus does and having just had a play with it, seems to handle >it fairly well. If you have a sandwhich (middle note shorter or longer than >top and bottom) and all notes are a quarter or less it gets in a bit of a >twist but how often does that get done? (And how would conventional notation >deal with it?) > >>On the whole, I'd prefer it if people >>either used as many voices as necessary to represent the music, > > but since there's no agreement on how to implement voices.... There's actually very little difference for simple things like this. It's only when you start getting fancy that you find that different programs do things in different ways, and even then if you take the trouble to find out how to do it you can write multivoice abc which will work everywhere. Try this: X:2 T:The Cotillion C:Trad (Bosham Band) M:4/4 L:1/8 K:G [V:1] G4 d4 | B2AB G2AB | c2B2 A2G2 | FGAF D3 D | [V:2] D4 B,4| D4 B,4 | E4 D4 | D4 A,3z | It's a lot more readable than your original version. >>or used ties, i.e. [B2D2-]D2 instead of [B2D4]. > > which would sound the same but look different when converted to >notation. Yes. Whether that matters depends on whether you are trying to make a copy of a piece of music which exists in manuscript form already, or doing a new transcription. >>Using unequal notes in chords just leads to too many ambiguities. > >Noteworthy Composer does it and I'm basically cribbing what it does. Does >anybody know what other packages do? I think abc2ps takes the length of chords from the first listed note. Don't know about other programs though. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
