| Author | Message | ||
     Tim Fatchen (flyingtadpole) Senior Forum User Username: flyingtadpole Post Number: 85 Registered: 1-2003 |
While COmposer is running as a sequencer, ie playing, I would like to be able to hit a key or combination and make whatever bar the cursor is in to loop until the key is hit again. THis is akin to hitting the space bar to stop and start, except that the particular bar keeps looping and STAYS IN TIME. The use is waiting for singers who're about to miss their cue, or to hang on a sequence while improvised ad libbing is going on on stage, or while other performance "business" is happening, or even loop on a bar of rests, so the poor conductor can just hit a key to get going again and not have to also fiddle with a mouse to set the new start point. Regards Tim Fatchen http://www.soundclick.com/flyingtadpole http://music.download.com/timfatchen http://music.download.com/internetopera | ||
| Mark Walsen (markwa) Notation Software Developer Username: markwa Post Number: 2579 Registered: 7-2003 |
Hello Tim, Ah, you want to use MidiNotate for live performances. There are indeed folks that do that. I must confess that MidiNotate was not envisioned for live stage performances, where the stakes are big for a flawless performance. The reason is that MidiNotate has to use a lot of your computer's resources to display the music notation-- probably 100 times more than it uses to play the MIDI, not counting the time the computer uses to translate the MIDI into sound, unless the MIDI is sent to an external device. Because MidiNotate is spending so much time displaying notation, it adds risk that the computer might get stressed out during a performance, and that the sound track might burp. MidiNotate guards against this by assigning a high priority to playing the MIDI and a low priority to displaying the notation. That's what's happening if you ever observe page turns and blue playback cursor lagging behind the music. That said, if you've used MidiNotate for 100s of hours on the system you'll be using in a live performance, and you've never heard it burp the playback, which is probably the case, then that might give you enough confidence to use it in a live performance. I'm hesitant to add the feature you've requested, because I wouldn't want MidiNotate to be mis-advertised as software for use in stage performances. Perhaps someday there will a version of MidiNotate intended for stage performances, where the score has been pre-formatted exactly for the intended size of the window. This avoids relatively risky operations such as repaginating the score on the fly, during playback, as you dynamically change the window size. (What other notation apps do that? :-) ) Cheers -- Mark | ||
| Tim Fatchen (flyingtadpole) Senior Forum User Username: flyingtadpole Post Number: 89 Registered: 1-2003 |
OK, point taken! I know I have to be very careful on my music computer when I'm simultaneously using Composer as a sequencer driving an external synthesiser, displaying the score so I can follow it, and recording the line in from the synthesizer(s). The computer is Celeron 900MHz, 256Mb RAM, an AGP video card 16MB, and the screen normally in the 1024-wide mode. I use a non-memory hungry recorder--currently the Creative recorder with the Audigy sound card--and if the score is at all complex, I reduce the Midinotate window to less than a third of the screen to avoid hiccups or odd halts. (I know I should actually be recording on this machine while using another to drive the sequencer, but never mind!) Even so, a 900MHz computer, bought on eBay for $200 a couple of years ago and now worth $50 or thereabouts, is not a fast machine compared with the current crop, so I see the problem diminishing. Regards Tim Fatchen http://www.soundclick.com/flyingtadpole http://music.download.com/timfatchen http://music.download.com/internetopera I must admit, I've always used the program as a live player. I came out of the original Cakewalk Apprentice, under MS-DOS, which was so pared down that it could only display one system, but never hiccupped (the screen was often 5 bars behind though!) So I just continued on with Midinotate 4 and then Composer. |
