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View Full Version : Alignment, Ordering of RH LH Notes


Lostpines
07-24-2012, 08:09 AM
I'm finding Notation Composer a fascinating tool to experiment with. My interest is downloading piano rolls captured on MIDI and printing sheet music to play on piano. These MIDI captures are unaligned relative to beat with complicated rhythms, making it impossible for Composer to correctly interpret. I'm OK with that. However, the printed sheet has lost alignment between right and left hand note placement that strike simultaneously in the performance, and at times ordering between LH and RH notes. They are aligned to the new as-noted interpreted rhythm which is incorrect. I know it's incorrect because when I snap to attack as-notated, playback stutters and jumps. What is needed under the piano roll menu is "Snap as-noted to performed attack." The performance is correct. What I'm asking is the ability to snap the note positions to the performed attack positions. Keep the note rhythm values, just line them up to the performed attack. It's what I expect to see on the music because I've heard the song, and I want to play it that way. The as-noted rhythms are quite complicated for humans to read (so it's OK that they are imperfect), but we pianists heavily depend on simultaneous note alignment, and ordering when we play, and those need to be right. This one feature would greatly improve piano playing usability of the generated sheets.

Sherry C
07-24-2012, 03:13 PM
Hi,

The piano roll project sounds fascinating, and there are a number of folks who are working to scan and save these.

You may find the ReBar feature to be more helpful for your purposes. It will help you to correctly line up the barlines where they belong, and should also help with cleaning up the alignment issues you mentioned as well.

You'll find a short Tutorial Video to get you started at http://www.notation.com/vb-forum/showthread.php?t=4064
and detailed step-by-step instructions in Help/Users Guide - just use the Index to look up "rebar".

Enjoy!
Sherry

Lostpines
07-24-2012, 04:15 PM
Thanks for the prompt response.

What is Notation really selling, and what are customers looking for?
There are many MIDI editing tools out there, and because music is irregular and complex, they all do a poor job of transcription, then rely on the user spending hours of manual editing. As soon as you tell me to spend time in an editor, Composer becomes no different than twenty other competing products. The whole mystique of Composer is to magically convert MIDI to sheet music with some configuration tweaks, but otherwise no manual intervention. There's a 2 GHz computer sitting on my desk waiting to do this so I don't have to. Snapping to performed attack does not require editing, and improves the user experience.

I've been thinking about the beat synchronization problem for the last few days as I've observed what this software does. I already have a number of techniques Composer is not doing that will likely result in significant improvement in beat alignment during transcription. My background is in physics, electrical engineering, computer design, and of course, music theory. Would it be possible to brainstorm with a couple of the software developers?

Perhaps it would be better to take this discussion off line. You have my email address.