Nick Rout wrote:
On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 10:15:07 +1300 david merriman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I did play around with RoseGarden briefly, but didn't really get into it. Maybe I should have another look. However, I do have a significant time investment in Noteworthy, and the Noteworthy Player is incredibly useful for many of my friends that I send music files to, so they can "follow the bouncing ball" (as it were) while the computer plays the notes and displays the notes and words on screen. Plus the .NWC files are tiny (2-3K for a typical song, including lyrics), making emailing music a much more pleasant task :-) .
Tried wine?
Yes, in fact I used to have Noteworthy running (kind of) under an old version of Wine, but when my PC died a death, I never bothered reinstalling it. Later I tried again with the latest (at the time) Wine version, but had no success running anything under it - my own failure to set it up correctly, I'm sure. Currently I boot into W2K whenever I want to use it, which is a pain.
Rosegarden is pretty well summarised in its web page and the tour on here http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
It uses its own file format, but my limited experience of it is with importing midi files and playing/viewing/fiddling with them. if i added other audio (eg .wav files) I believe I could save the whole project as a rosegarden format file.
when you import a midi file it generates the score on the fly. You can then edit notes etc. Now that I have a usb midi port i can also record what i play at the piano, as well as play midi stuff back to the piano (which, because it has nice samples from a real grand piano, sounds a lot better than the computer speakers.)
All the stuff I do in Noteworthy is entered by hand, with no MIDI input at all. I've done a lot of work for the Contemporary A Cappella Society (www.casa.org) in the States, helping them tidy up hand-written arrangements and storing them as PDF files for their arrangement library. Noteworthy's ability to do everything via the keyboard has made entering music incredibly fast, and when you're peering at an almost-impossible-to-read scan of a hand-written page in a PDF file, the less effort required the better :-D . When I looked at RoseGarden, I didn't see how to enter notes, etc. by keyboard (I may just have missed it), so it seemed less useful at the time.
Beyond that I have not fiddled much. I have only just got the usb midi thing. It took some work to get going (the usb device needs firmware, you plug it in, hot plug detects it, downloads the firmware, then restarts it and it gets a new product id and acts as a usb-audio device).
I need to set up a nice little stand next to the piano to sit the laptop on so that its easy to control recording from the piano.
As far as writing scores is concerned you should also take a look at lilypond.
Yes, I did look at Lilypond a while ago. It certainly looks cool, and I've considered using it, but I'm not sure if it's worth it for the stuff I do. Most of the time, Noteworthy's output is fine. If Noteworthy could export to Lilypond, that would be perfect. Again, maybe I should have another look at it. It's certainly got more flexibility than Noteworthy in its output.
David
The pen is mightier than the sword, but only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp
